You might want to take a look at this report from Pew Research from 2012 on the problems with the U. S. system of voter registration. It’s pretty eye-opening. Among their findings:

• An eighth of registrations are in error in one form or another.
• About 1% of all registered voters are deceased.
• About 2% of voters are registered to vote in more than one state.
• Our system or, rather, lack of system is absurdly antiquated and expensive.

That’s a bit worse than my little anecdotal observations. What we saw was that about 2% of registrations in our precinct were in error. Of course, our precinct is a very orderly one.

On top of all of this many jurisdictions have no way of detecting invalid registrations. It’s really a mess.

Sturgeon’s Law is as true of scientific research as everything else. “Sturgeon’s Law” is usually stated as “90% of everything is crap”.

At Stat Ivan Oransky and David Marcus point out that the real problem afflicting science may not be outright fraud but just plain shoddy workmanship:

If a burst pipe in your house is flooding your basement, you’re probably going to be more worried about that than the couple termites you previously spotted. But multiply those termites times a thousand and suddenly the bigger threat to your house might be, well, the little things.

The same holds true for science. Science fraud draws urgent attention whenever it comes to light, the equivalent of a busted pipe emergency. But it turns out, most scientists think it’s a far lesser threat to their field than the small, but legion, instances of underreporting of negative findings and scientists’ use of shoddy methodology.

I think there’s an even greater problem: the creation of a scientific establishment funded through government grants. It lends itself to cronyism, corruption, and waste. There are far, far too many examples of studies with irreproducible results being published by the “right people”. I’ll give your bogus study a good peer review if you’ll give mine one.

Maybe we should start worrying that there’s a sort of Gresham’s Law with respect to scientific research in which bad research drives out good research.

IMO we should begin changing our strategy for funding research to one based on results. What might that be? I don’t know. A greatly expanded prize system as opposed to the present grant system?

Speaking of puzzling policies and re-opening negotiations, at National Interest Doug Bandow wants the U. S. to reconsider our 60 year old policy of maintaining 29,000 American soldiers in South Korea on the U. S. taxpayers’ tab:

In the 1960s South Korea took off economically, soon passing the collectivist North. Democracy arrived in the ROK in 1989, when the South’s last military junta passed into history. With the end of the Cold War, Pyongyang lost its most important allies: both Moscow and Beijing recognized Seoul, and neither would back the DPRK in another aggressive war today.

The South possesses roughly twice the population and forty times the GDP of North Korea. South Korea is an industrial power. Seoul enjoys the international connections of a first rate state. Although the ROK’s military is smaller than that of the North, the South’s equipment and training are far superior. Only in quantity is Seoul’s armed forces inferior and there is no artifact of geography which prevents the ROK from doing more. Rather, South Korea has no reason to invest more on territorial defense when the world’s greatest military power is prepared to intervene on its behalf.

The critical question is one of cost-benefit analysis. We know what South Korea gets from the policy. We know what our side costs. We spend about $2 billion a year maintaining our bases in South Korea, of which the South Korean government pays about 40%. It’s not entirely clear whether we’re receiving $1.2 billion of benefit from the arrangement that we wouldn’t receive without forking out the dough.

I don’t have ready answers for these questions but I think reconsidering our policies is worthwhile. The world has changed quite a bit in 60 years. We seem to have gone ipsy swipsy from Lord Palmerston’s famous remark. We have no permanent interests, just permanent policies.

One of the bizarre things about American politics is how multiple policies that nobody particularly likes add up to a single policy that many will fight to the death to defend. The most obvious example of that is Social Security retirement, a combination of stipends that are too small with a payroll tax onerous to both workers and businesses, adding up to a program that is the third rail of American politics.

Another is the U. S. policy with respect to the People’s Republic of China on the mainland and the Republic of China in Taiwan.

Recently Donald Trump was in the news (as usual), this time over a phone conversation with the president of Taiwan. Old China hands were up in arms. Whether their concern was about the policy implications or the invasion of their turf is hard to say but the call rocked the long-established “One China Policy” boat from the U. S. side of the skiff.

The idea that there is only one China has been a staple both on the mainland and of Kuomintang Taiwan for very nearly the last 70 years. They just disagree over whether the People’s Republic of China or the Republic of China (Taiwan) is China’s legitimate government, a substantial sticking point.

When Richard Nixon began his rapprochement with the PRC, he neither accepted nor reject the “One China Policy”. He just conceded that it was the PRC’s official policy as part of the cost of opening negotiations.

Jimmy Carter broke off relations with the ROC unilaterally in 1979, without the support of Congress. That was within his power as president but what is done by presidential fiat may be undone by presidential fiat. And that’s pretty much where the matter stands.

All of the foregoing ignores a critical question: what should our policy with respect to China be? One China or two? If one, which is the legitimate China? Or do we care?

I don’t have an answer to these questions and, honestly, don’t even have an opinion. In that I suspect I’m like most Americans.

Whatever the answer I suspect we should be prepared for some major changes in U. S. policy. It looks like the negotiations are re-opening.

The Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, signed into law by Warren G. Harding, required the president for the first time in U. S. history to submit a budget to the Congress. It does not ever appear to have been challenged in the courts despite what appear to me to be serious separation of powers issues.

Or, said another way, we may be heading into a constitutional crisis. If so, I predict it will neither be the first nor the last in this administration.

Have you ever heard that phrase about “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable”? Journalists have adopted it as a sort of unofficial motto, proof positive that either they’ve never read the original source material, they have no senses of humor, or both.

Here’s the original quote in context, from the mouth of the Sage of Bridgeport, Mr. Dooley himself:

Th newspaper does ivrything f’r us. It runs th’ polis foorce an’ th’ banks, commands th’ milishy, controls th’ ligislachure, baptizes th’ young, marries th’ foolish, comforts th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable, buries th’ dead an’ roasts thim aftherward.

from Observations by Mr. Dooley (1902) p. 250.

In other words Finley Peter Dunne is mocking the vanity and self-importance of journalists. Some things never change.

Writing at Motherboard Kaleigh Rogers throws in the towel on what’s a good diet:

Are organic foods healthier for you than conventional foods? How about genetically-modified crops? If you’re not totally sure about the answer to these questions, you’re not alone.

A new survey from the Pew Research Center shows the US public is very divided on issues of food and nutrition. But if you look at a controversial report—which the British Medical Journal just doubled-down on—on the science behind our nutrition guidelines, it’s not too surprising that none of us seems to know what we ought to be eating.

I honestly don’t know what Americans should be eating but I’ll put in my two cents. They should be eating less. A lot less. I wonder if people realize just how little the dietary guidelines of roughly 2,000 calories a day for adult men and 1,600 for adult women are? The number of calories in a Big Mac Meal (Big Mac, small fries, and a small Coke) is about 1,100.

If we ate a much greater variety of foods in significantly smaller quantity, we’d probably be better off.

I’ve mentioned it before but my mom was an early fan of Adelle Davis. Needless to say nobody would trade lunches with us in school.

Some are breathlessly proclaiming Donald Trump the new Hitler. Whether that actually materializes remains to be seen. Many were irate over Vladimir Putin’s incursion into Ukraine, notionally in defense of the Russian minority there, remembering that Hitler justified his invasion of the Sudetenland as defense of the Germans who lived there although those areas of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia were part of Czechoslovakia. We may, however, be averting our gaze from a figure whose resemblance to Hitler is much more immediate—Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. At War on the Rocks Aykan Erdemir and Merve Tahiroglu point out:

The Mosul operation has made the predominantly Turkmen city of Tal Afar the latest focus of Turkey and Iran’s sectarian struggle for influence in post-Islamic State Iraq. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has warned against allowing Iran-backed Shiite militias to liberate the city. He deployed troops to the Iraqi border to back up his words. Erdogan’s interest in Tal Afar is an extension of a domestic agenda to further consolidate his powers under an executive presidential system. The Turkish president knows that Iraq’s Turkmen are crucial to his political future – both for mobilizing nationalist sentiment at home and for burnishing his image as patron of Sunni Muslims abroad.

Iraq’s Turkmen are the remnants of centuries of Turkic migration to the region, particularly after the area came under the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century. Post-Ottoman, republican Turkey considered the Mosul area part of the Turkish “homeland” until 1926, when it agreed it would be part of British-controlled Iraq in return for part of its oil revenues. More recently, Erdogan fanned the flames of irredentism by floating the idea of a “Greater Turkey” including Mosul and other neighboring territories.

Iraq’s Turkmen are estimated to number anywhere between 500,000 to 3 million, making them the country’s third-largest ethnic group – comprising 1.3 to 7.8 percent of the population – after Arabs and Kurds. Like the Arabs (and to a lesser extent Kurds), the country’s Turkmen are religiously diverse: Roughly six in 10 are Sunni and the rest Shia. On top of that layer, local and tribal alliances have formed, cutting across sectarian lines. None of the major Turkmen organizations in Iraq, including the Turkmen Rescue Foundation – an advocacy group – and the Iraqi Turkmen Front – a political umbrella organization – represents a particular sect exclusively.

Turkmen ties with Ankara are complicated. While some welcome Ankara’s recent aid and cooperation, others cling to the belief that Turkey has abandoned them for decades. Ankara was relatively silent during the murder of thousands of Turkmen under Saddam Hussein’s rule and after. More recently, Turkey issued only a muted response to the Islamic State seizing Iraqi-Turkmen towns and committing massacres in Tal Afar, Amirli, and villages south of Kirkuk in June 2014. Thus, despite their linguistic and ancestral kinship with Turkey, most Iraqi Turkmen consider themselves part of Iraq.

I wonder how far the man whom some are calling “Sultan Tayyip” wants to go in defense of ethnic Turks? Turkmens live across the whole breadth of Asia.

Also, was the supposed coup attempt of a couple of months ago his Reichstag fire?

Yesterday my wife and I went to see Berlioz’s epic work Les Troyens based on Virgil’s Aeneid. It was the first time that either of us had ever seen the work produced. That shouldn’t be unexpected. Since the completion of the opera’s composition in 1858, it has only been produced 10 times in the United States and the present production marks the first time the work has been produced at Lyric Opera.

Les Troyens has been characterized as “the most important work in 19th century French opera”. I guess that depends on your operative definition of “important”. I think it disregards Bizet’s Carmen too casually. Offhand I would guess that at any given time there are probably 20 productions of Carmen being mounted somewhere in the world in stark contrast to the rarity of producing Les Troyens. Yes, Carmen is vulgar and tawdry, which may account for its popularity. We did not leave Les Troyens humming its tunes.

Les Troyens is grand opera in every sense. Its performances last five hours, nearly the equivalent of binge-watching a whole season of Orange Is the New Black. Its subject matter is monarchs, kingdoms, heroes, and gods. Its sentiments are mostly lofty. IMO it is probably the most important 19th century French opera seria. It is to some extent a throwback. If you tossed in some secco recitativo is could be mistaken for a late 18th century work.

The production is monumental. Its cast consists of 20 principals and major parts and an expanded chorus. The orchestra, too, is expanded—the work’s orchestration calls for an orchestra nearly twice the size of, say, Rigoletto—including “6 or 8 harps” and obscure instruments like saxhorns, antique sistrums, and tarbuka (a goblet drum).

Structurally, the work consists of a number of tableaux. Other than in the fifth act little action is portrayed on stage. The cast mostly sings about their emotional reactions to the events going on off-stage.

It takes place outside the walls of Troy, at the end of the siege and in the newly-built city of Carthage in North Africa. It spans a period of years. The work violates every principle of French drama (time, place, and subject).

Lyric’s production did great justice to the material. The set of the first three acts of the opera, set outside the walls of Troy, consisted of scorched concrete and twisted rebar and is pictured above. It made very good use of projected effects. The shadow of the Greeks’ horse pictured above made for a highly effective lighting effect.

The music was magnificent, the voices and orchestra in wonderful balance, complementing and reinforcing each other. Special note should be taken of Brandon Jovanovich, who did a very creditable job of singing Aeneas, an exacting and grueling tenor role.

All in all a very fine production at Lyric.

The Critics

At the Chicago Tribune John von Rhein declaims:

The stunning new production by British stage director Tim Albery met the inordinate requirements of Berlioz’s magnum opus with vigorous dramatic intelligence and spectacular but spare visual flair. A huge cast, strongly headed by Susan Graham as Queen Dido of Carthage, Brandon Jovanovich as the Trojan hero Aeneas and Christine Goerke as the Trojan Princess Cassandra, along with Lyric’s stalwart orchestra and chorus, met the daunting musical challenges head-on under that seasoned Berliozan, Lyric music director Andrew Davis. All the principal singers save for Graham were making their role debuts, and everybody came through impressively.

Up to now, local Berlioz fanatics had to content themselves with slim pickings from the “Troyens” table. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra ventured concert versions of both parts of the opera under James Levine at Ravinia in 1978. For later concert performances at Orchestra Hall, the CSO split the opera in two under Zubin Mehta’s baton, presenting “The Taking of Troy” in 2001, “The Trojans at Carthage” in 2002. Rumors of Lyric’s undertaking a complete, fully staged production floated around the grapevine for a while but came to naught.

For the record, the Albery production is entirely new and bears no relation to the much-praised “Troyens” he directed during the late 1980s and early ’90s for several leading British opera companies, including the Welsh National Opera when Lyric general director Anthony Freud was then at the helm. Lyric is presenting the five acts as three, with judicious musical trims bringing the running time to approximately five hours, including two intermissions.

No audience member who’s accustomed to sitting through the longer Wagner operas should have any problem with that, especially given the fact that there’s no letup in sweeping vitality, either in the pit or on the stage.

Albery’s aim clearly was to integrate the myriad elements to create an overarching sense of historic mission and personal moral struggle. In keeping with that intention, designer Tobias Hoheisel’s handsome, open set and modern costumes enforce continuity from the two acts set in besieged Troy to the three that take place in the newly built Carthage.

While at the Sun-Times Hedy Weiss observes:

Without hammering home the obvious similarities of “then” and “now,” the five-hour production of “Les Troyens” that opened Sunday in a new production and Lyric Opera of Chicago premiere, brings this ancient story to life with such compelling musical, dramatic and scenic brilliance that you might well leave the theater wishing Berlioz, who never lived to see his five act opera performed in its entirety, could be watching it from some “better place.”

A massive undertaking, “Les Troyens” has been staged with superb clarity and emotional heat by British director Tim Albery, whose cast could not be more sublime. And it is buoyed continually by the exquisite work of the Lyric Opera orchestra under the masterful direction of Sir Andrew Davis, who brings the extraordinary beauty and fervor of Berlioz’s score to roaring life. The production also is a glorious showcase for the formidable voices and personalities of Lyric Opera’s grand chorus, led by chorus master Michael Black.

She goes on to describe the performance as a “once in a lifetime experience”.

Deanna Isaacs at Chicago Reader:

There are some issues. You can’t sign on for a five-hour performance and then complain about the length, but Berlioz’s libretto—he wrote his own, drawing on Virgil—is not consistently compelling. (The folks who could be seen bailing out during the second intermission, after a rather somnolent fourth act, missed performance highlights by Jovanovich and Graham in act five.) And Tobias Hoheisel’s spare, mostly gray sets and costumes (which seem to set the action in the 1940s) may be aiming for a film-noir effect, but are just unrelentingly drab. The major set component, a huge rotating shell that stands for both ancient cities, is as likely to bring to mind the oil-storage tanks of Gary, Indiana. Projections (water, fire, the shadow of a giant horse, and one that looks like it came from a planetarium show) don’t make up for the overall lack of visual interest. It’s a production drained of color, except where it’s most important—in the music.

And the music is great. All three of the internationally celebrated leads do justice to their difficult, high-voltage roles, as do the many featured singers, including, most notably, mezzo-soprano Okka von der Damerau as Dido’s sister, Anna. The Lyric Opera orchestra, led by music director Sir Andrew Davis, delivers every dramatic nuance of Berlioz’s beautiful score. And the real star of the show is the Lyric Opera chorus, under the direction of chorus master Michael Black. Doubled in size, it’s a magnificent vocal presence—from the opening scene of the Trojan masses to the stunned Carthaginians grouped around Dido’s pyre.

Lawrence A. Johnson at Chicago Classical Review:

Christine Goerke proved a solid Cassandra in her role debut, singing her warnings to the people of Troy fluently and idiomatically. Goerke’s expansive soprano sounded surprisingly slender at times, perhaps due in part to singing from the wall’s towering parapet. Considering the stakes for her city of Troy, one would have liked more dramatic bite and emotional intensity, with Goerke’s Cassandra too generalized and low-voltage.

With his belated entrance in Part One, Brandon Jovanovich as Aeneas injected some much-needed vitality into the proceedings. That set the stage for the move to Carthage in Part Two, where this Troyens improved markedly in most every way. Along with the ballet sequences, projections by Illuminos provided visual relief with ruins, forests and waterfalls breaking up the monotony of the barren city walls (the corny starry backdrop for the love duet not so much).

Most importantly, the singing really took flight with Susan Graham’s Dido and Jovanovich’s Aeneas providing most of the sparks.

concluding:

Even with low-energy stretches and a mixed staging, Berlioz’s Troyens is unlikely to come this way again anytime soon, and the opportunity to catch this show should not be missed.