How Syrian refugees are vetted

In The Washington Post, A Syrian refugees tells the story of how her family was rigorously vetted before coming to the US:

President Trump says that it is not safe to accept certain kinds of refugees without “extreme vetting” that he has yet to detail. So he has now banned people from seven countries, including Syria, which I fled with my family in 2014. But we were thoroughly vetted before we came here, just like other refugees — exhaustively, endlessly vetted. We are not terrorists. And if we’d been stopped from coming here, we would be suffering horribly right now.

Trump’s border wall will be horrible for the planet

A new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates the environmental destruction Trump’s proposed border wall will wreak upon the planet:

A 1,000-mile (1,600-kilometer) wall would require an estimated 275 million cubic feet of concrete. It would release as much as 1.9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to Christoph Meinrenken, an associate research scientist at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. That’s more than the annual emissions from every home in Pittsburgh.

That’s just for the raw materials alone. This is to say nothing of all the machinery that will be required to put it there, as well as the displacement of indigenous creatures and associated damage.

For a great visualization of the madness, check out this short film from The Intercept that shows just how much ground there is to cover.

Context for that leaked videotape from ‘A Dog’s Purpose’

On January 18, TMZ leaked incredibly damaging footage of the making of the upcoming wide release film, A Dog’s Purpose. It shows a couple of clips stitched together: a dog being forced into raging waters, and then later, that dog submerged while rescuers rush to get him out.

In a column on THR, producer and dog lover Gavin Polone tries to explain the circumstances that led to this situation:

Before the first real take, the handlers were asked to change the start point of the dog from the left side, where he had rehearsed, to the right side. That, evidentially, is what caused him to be spooked. When the dog didn’t want to do the scene from the new position, they cut, though not soon enough, and then went back to the original position. The dog was comfortable and went in on his own and they shot the scene. The TMZ video only shows the unfinished take of when the dog was on the right side. What is clear from viewing all the footage was that the dog was NEVER forced into the water.

From a front angle, when they shot the scene, you can see that there is a calmer path in the artificial water turbulence for the dog to move through. This is not visible in the TMZ video. You can also see, at the end of the scene, the dog going underwater for four seconds, which never should have happened, and then the diver and handlers lifting the dog out of the pool. The dog then shook off and trotted around the pool, unharmed and unfazed. They only did one take of the full scene and then ended for the day. TMZ’s edited version gives the impression that the dog was thrown in and eventually drowned, since the two parts seem to be connected. You never see him pulled out and OK. This is highly misleading.

Polone does not excuse everyone’s behavior — he believes things should not have happened as they did, and he calls out the AHA and PETA for being not up to the task and for being uncooperative, respectively. But there is more to the story that the tape does not show.

Polone also speculates that the videotape was held until this month to be sold to TMZ for the highest value possible. This part is highly plausible to me: The tape’s timing and the way it is edited were done to have maximum damage to the release of the film. That doesn’t just happen by accident.

The case for conservatives realizing that Trump has issues

Over at Pajiba, Dustin Rowles has compiled in which conservatives have expressed concern about the way that the new Trump regime is distorting the truth and eroding the country’s credibility:

The media is pushing back, at least. So much so that Bannon called them the opposition, rather than the Democrats, and from what we have seen from Dems in Congress, he’s not wrong. Congressional Democrats have not been nearly as vocal as they should be (with some exception). Ultimately, however, because they have the numbers, it’s important that Republicans push back, as well, because that’s when things will start to unravel.

For the most part, however, Congressional Republicans have been ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. They seem to be looking on with a kind of bemusement, as Trump quietly destroys their party. However, there are signs of life.

The end of Moore’s Law

Tim Cross over at The Guardian has an interesting piece on how Moore’s Law is bumping against the realities of physics and business:

Shrinking a chip’s components gets harder each time you do it, and with modern transistors having features measured in mere dozens of atoms, engineers are simply running out of room. There have been roughly 22 ticks of Moore’s law since the launch of the 4004 in 1971 through to mid-2016. For the law to hold until 2050 means there will have to be 17 more, in which case those engineers would have to figure out how to build computers from components smaller than an atom of hydrogen, the smallest element there is. That, as far as anyone knows, is impossible.

Yet business will kill Moore’s law before physics does, for the benefits of shrinking transistors are not what they used to be. Moore’s law was given teeth by a related phenomenon called “Dennard scaling” (named for Robert Dennard, an IBM engineer who first formalised the idea in 1974), which states that shrinking a chip’s components makes that chip faster, less power-hungry and cheaper to produce. Chips with smaller components, in other words, are better chips, which is why the computing industry has been able to persuade consumers to shell out for the latest models every few years. But the old magic is fading.

American Christianity has failed at its core mission

I was raised in a conservative Christian church in Massachusetts. The more time I spent in a conventional evangelical environment, the more it seemed to me that the things the church prioritized weren’t very aligned with the teachings of Jesus.

Over at Sojourners, Stephen Mattson agrees. He’s penned a scathing indictment of “American Christianity”:

Because while the gospels instruct followers of Christ to help the poor, oppressed, maligned, mistreated, sick, and those most in need of help, Christians in America have largely supported measures that have rejected refugees, refused aid to immigrants, cut social services to the poor, diminished help for the sick, fueled xenophobia, reinforced misogyny, ignored racism, stoked hatred, reinforced corruption, and largely increased inequality, prejudice, and fear.

I wish Mattson was more clear about his definition of “Christianity” here, but the article otherwise captures exactly how I feel. The fact that the American Right has supported policies and candidates that neglect the most needy in our society has been a heartbreaking development for me.

I hope the message of peace, hope, and love becomes an idea embraced by all political parties, and soon.

Seattle will not back down

Heidi Grover, covering today’s speech by Seattle Mayor Ed Murray for The Stranger:

Today, as President Donald Trump issued plans build a border wall with Mexico and crack down on cities that offer refuge to undocumented immigrants, vows to fight back were issued by city, county, and federal officials from Seattle.

“I am willing to lose every single penny to protect those people,” Murray said of immigrants, refugees, and Muslims, groups that have been the targets of Trump’s onslaught of executive orders in recent days. One of Trump’s executive orders, issued today, takes aim at “sanctuary cities,” like Seattle, that do not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. Trump has said he plans to cut federal funding to such cities as a way of coercing them to cooperate with deportations or punishing them if they refuse. Another order will restrict immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries.

Seattle stands to lose over $80 million in federal funding if Trump successfully makes good on his threat to revoke federal funding to sanctuary cities.

The Twitter Resistance

Kaitlyn Tiffany, writing for The Verge about how official social media accounts are going “underground” in light of government suppression:

Three people who claim to be employees of the National Park Service’s Mount Rainier Park in Washington have taken up where the official NPS and EPA Twitter accounts have been forced to leave off. Last night, they tweeted dozens of times from the handle @AltNatParkSer, promoting climate change facts and the upcoming Scientists’ March on Washington, interspersing jokes like “Parks and Rekt” and “can’t wait for President Trump to call us FAKE NEWS.” The spirit of rebellion is catching: this account has amassed over 300,000 followers overnight, paired with thousands of messages of support from people on Twitter eager to see someone, anyone take a stand against Trump’s despotic new policies.