Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Having just finished listening to Andrew Sullivan interview Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson concerning their new book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, I came away simply more convinced that our political system’s denizens have become dangerously ossified and cancerous. Tapper and Thompson, of course, concentrate on Biden, but implicitly indict the balance of the Democrats for not interfering (with kudos to exception former Rep Dean Phillips (D-MN), who took the Nikki Haley role as wannabe spoiler) with Biden’s election run. Add in the alleged manipulation of Biden by his Chief of Staff, Ron Klain, keeping in mind Sullivan’s loathing for the DEI way of doing things, such as identitarian reservation of positions, and the Democrats come off looking very bad.

And then they lost to that other Party which, for the good of the United States, should be replaced, the Republican Party. I’m inclined to say the entire Democratic Party, from Senator Klobuchar (D-MN) to the State legislators, really should go.

But the media also comes in for some well-deserved kicks, too. I know that I was taken in by their refusals to report on Biden’s true condition, and I’m not altogether happy about it.

I’m not a real fan of Sullivan’s interview technique, but it’s not awful, and he elicits a lot of information from these subjects. But you do have to pay for it – which is only right.

So here’s to getting rid of the Republicans and the Democrats, and their awful autocratic inclinations. Salut!

I’d sure like to view Senator John Kennedy’s (R-LA) flow of thoughts right at the moment, in view of this exchange with Commerce Secretary, and billionaire lacking any sort of link with reality, Luttnick:

KENNEDY: If Vietnam came to you and said, ‘You win. We’re gonna remove all tariffs and all trade barriers. Would the US please do the same?” Would you accept that deal?

LUTNICK: Absolutely not. That would be the silliest thing we could do

KENNEDY: What’s the purpose of reciprocity then?

Judging from the Senator’s line of inquiry, he’s rapidly finding himself separating from the Trump Administration. Keeping in mind that Senator Kennedy was once a Democrat and he’s an old-line politician, I have to wonder if he’s considering his next move.

Return to the Democrats? Seems unlikely. He left for a reason. Stick with the Republicans? While it seems the easiest, if his constituents begin to hate on the Republicans, then his seat may be endangered.

Become Independent? He’d be joining King and Sanders, and possibly Murkowski, in this category. That’s make for a fascinating mess.

I think he’ll quietly stick with the Republicans or retire, as he’s in his early seventies now and his body probably detests the long hours of politics. But it’s worth keeping an eye on his guy.

Here’s why science isn’t really for the “common sense” types:

2023 smashed the record for the hottest year, but it might have been even hotter. The entire northern hemisphere would have been nearly 1°C warmer on average during its summer without the cooling effect of smoke from massive wildfires in Canada, a climate model suggests. The smoke may also have led to the driest August in India on record.

“I think it’s really hard to comprehend how gigantic the fires were. It was insane,” says Iulian-Alin Rosu at the Technical University of Crete in Greece, who presented his team’s findings at a meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna, Austria.

The emissions were around five or six times higher than those during any previously recorded wildfire season in Canada, estimates Rosu. The carbon dioxide from these fires is having an ongoing warming effect, but in 2023 this warming was outweighed by the cooling effect of smoke blocking sunlight. [“Massive wildfires in Canada helped keep the world cooler in 2023,” Michael Le Page, NewScientist (24 May 2025, paywall)]

There’s always something waiting around the corner to trip you up on your triumphal trot to the finish line.

Professor Richardson summarizes the appointment of Thomas C. Fugate to head the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships at the United States Department of Homeland Security, as Wikipedia reports:

Hannah Allam of ProPublica reported on Wednesday that the White House has put a 22-year-old recent college graduate with no experience in national security in charge of overseeing the government’s main center for preventing terrorism. Thomas Fugate’s main credentials for his position in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which includes overseeing $18 million in grants to local authorities to combat violent extremism, appear to be his time spent as an intern at the right-wing Heritage Foundation and his loyalty to Trump.

The Professor misses one qualification:

That’s a TV-ready face if I’ve ever seen one, and that’s an important aspect of the Trump vetting process.

Which is as much an indictment of the Trump Administration as any.

The silly shit pulled by politicians frantic to move up the Trump power ladder:

Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) introduced a bill Thursday to rename the Washington, D.C., subway system after President Trump and his MAGA slogan.

The Make Autorail Great Again Act would withhold federal funding to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, known as WMATA, until it rebrands as the Washington Metropolitan Authority for Greater Access, or WMAGA — a similar acronym to the Make America Great Again slogan — and renames the Metrorail the Trump Train. [The Hill]

Steube’s supporting statement is a mishmash of Republican boilerplate and sheer gibberish. I haven’t gone looking, but this self-serving piece of crap is probably the high point of the Representative’s political career. And will remain so.

In case the phrase Reverse Discrimination animates you … oh, wait. If you’re puzzled, here’s Wikipedia:

Reverse discrimination is a term used to describe discrimination against members of a dominant or majority group, in favor of members of a minority or historically disadvantaged group. Reverse discrimination based on race or ethnicity is also called reverse racism.

OK, so what happened a while back at the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals?

… decision that placed a heightened burden upon a plaintiff who is a member of a “majority group” in discrimination cases, requiring that the plaintiff shows “background circumstances to support the suspicion that the defendant is that unusual employer who discriminates against the majority.” [USA Today]

In other words, that court claimed it was harder to prove reverse discrimination than discrimination. So what did SCOTUS say about this?

There is no such thing as reverse discrimination. There is just discrimination. It doesn’t matter if someone is White or Black, straight or gay, male or female. It only matters if they’ve been discriminated against.

On June 5, the Supreme Court handed down a unanimous decision removing barriers for members of majority groups to file anti-discrimination suits. In this case, Marlean Ames, a straight woman, filed a suit against her employer, which she said denied a promotion in favor of a gay woman, and later demoted her in favor of a gay man filling her role. [USA Today]

Bold mine, because it matters. Compensatory discrimination – my phrase – for past discrimination against members of targeted groups doesn’t make for justice, and both wings of the Court agree on this conclusion, or at least that’s how this software engineer sees it.

The left may flutter about it, but the left wing of the Court, to reiterate, made it a unanimous decision – and implicitly rejects identitarian politics. As identitarian politics is one of the factors damaging lefty, and Democratic, politics, this is actually a good thing. The faster it’s expunged from the intellectual arguments of a substantial portion of the population, the better off we’ll be.

Erick Erickson has an uneasy feeling concerning the Trump-Musk whatever-it-is:

Oh, and Trump just alienated Leonard Leo, who has over a billion dollars to spend advancing the right.

In both the case of Elon Musk and Leonard Leo, I suspect a few too many grifters have whispered in the ears of those around the President to help poison the well for their own advantage, not for the rest of us or even the President.

I assume, because of their mutual interests, Musk and Trump will ultimately kiss and make up and everyone will insist it was all staged. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get some peace offering of some kind today, probably a meme on Twitter from Musk. Neither man wants to give the left a win, and both men share a list of common enemies.

If this is not a scripted event to con the left, and everyone else, then Erickson’s worries about grifters is fully justified. The near-absolute individualism of the United States has a popular attribute: avarice. That’s the teachings of the United States, after all, and why the financial industry is huge.

But avarice is not an attribute of the cooperative, such as Trump/Musk. Avarice justifies theft, betrayal, and many of the other behaviors not desired in cooperatives. Avarice and self-sacrifice are immiscible over the long term, unstable over the short-term.

The left, less wed to individualism than the right, tends to be unstable due to autocratic tendencies exacerbated by the skepticism of independents and the right concerning lefty proposals that impinge on individualistic rights. Just sayin’.

If you’re not a politics nor tech watcher, you may have missed the war of words between President Trump and Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, uh, and other companies. CNN/Politics provides a running report here.

Tesla stock soared in the months after the presidential election because investors were convinced Donald Trump was about to do massive favors for his largest financial backer, CEO Elon Musk. But Trump can also do great damage to Musk’s many business interests.

The risk of that damage is one reason Tesla shares tumbled 14% in trading following their public spat yesterday.

But it’s not just Tesla that could be at risk. SpaceX depends on government contracts for a significant share of its revenue. And Musk’s companies all face government regulation.

My reaction, though, is Really?

I could interpret this clash as the collision of two titanic egos, or as an example of Mr. Musk’s political inexperience and naivete, as he objects to the Big, Beautiful Bill that has already passed the House sans full review, as a bloated disaster.

Or is this, and I use this word in respect to President Trump’s former career as a TV actor, a scripted event, designed to distract the chattering classes from something of far more importance? It would certainly fit right into Mr. Trump’s conman approach to life, using one hand to distract his audience, while stealing their wallets with the other.

If this feud suddenly disappears, we’ll know it’s the conman approach.

Apophenia:

Apophenia (/æpoʊˈfiːniə/) is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. [Wikipedia]

Noted in the list Cognitive Biases and Heuristics in “Highly Effective Thinkers: Critical Thinking for Teens,” Timothy Redmond, Skeptical Inquirer (May/June 2025, paywall). A lovely article on strategies for communicating survival skills in the Digital Age to teenagers, or, as I think of it, skills for self-awareness.

Professor Richardson mentions the apparent intent of the right to impose a narrow theocracy on the United States:

The use of the government to impose evangelical beliefs on the country, even at the expense of lives, also appears to be an administration goal. Yesterday, the administration announced it is ending the Biden administration’s 2022 guidance to hospital emergency rooms that accept Medicare—which is virtually all of them—requiring that under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act they must perform an abortion in an emergency if the procedure is necessary to prevent a patient’s organ failure or severe hemorrhaging. The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act requires emergency rooms to stabilize patients.

Skipping over the obvious objections where militant Christianity tends to exterminate its rivals in various ghastly ways^[1], I think it’s more than word trickery to notice that just a few word substitutions results in the arbitrary and relatively-undiscussed ideology of transgenderism being the imposed ideas, rather than those of evangelical Christianity – all without implying obviously wrong assumptions or assertions. While advocates for either side may object to this description being applied to their beloved ideology, particularly when it comes to proof, neither has a convincing case.

Keep in mind Professor Turchin’s observation^[2] that the first generation, following the expungement of an existential enemy, to find itself at loggerheads with itself over one or more pointless ideologies that inspires adherents and serves as a cloak for those who seek power, does not know the horror of internecine strife; it’s the next generation, bruised, bleeding, and battered, that cedes to the assertion that Compromise is a good thing, and engages in negotiations rather than war. But with the power of our weapons nearing that of the power of Gods of whatever mythos you prefer, will America survive that first generation’s war?

All this leads to the observation that the Evangelical right and the Radical Left, the latter defined by ‘open borders’ and blind support, sans convincing evidence, for transgenderism and sexual or gender fluidity, may be considered more primitive segments of American society, disdaining those who suggest doubt and compromise are attributes of true adults.

Pick your position wisely, and if a new political party becomes available that you find attractive, then pick them. While the ethicists will argue that it’s an inferior ethic to do so, when both sides advocate fascism, it’s better to walk away from them.

¹ For those who prefer more specificity, the usual approach is to burn their rivals at the stake. However, in this age of automatic weapons, each side may prefer indiscriminate, if unsatisfying, slaughter.

² Ages of Discord, Peter Turchin (2016). Almost certainly found in Chapter I, as that’s the extent of my reading, so far, of this book. I also recommend his Secular Cycles and War and Peace and War, both of which are less an exposure to technical aspects of his theory.

What’s the trigger?

The Labor Department on Wednesday yanked Biden-era guidance that strongly discouraged employers against offering cryptocurrency in workers’ 401(k) plan options.

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said the policy was an attempt by the previous administration “to put their thumb on the scale” against cryptocurrency investments.

“We’re rolling back this overreach and making it clear that investment decisions should be made by fiduciaries, not DC bureaucrats,” she said in a statement. [Politico]

That statement doesn’t bother me that much, actually. But then the evil side whispered in my ear:

What’s to stop the Trumpie’s from reversing that statement, to encourage 401(k) investors to buy crypto as an investment?

Sure, we can go full evil – change encourage to require!

Yeah, think about that – a requirement that each 401(k) account invest .5% of its funds in $TRUMP.

It makes my skin crawl, but I suppose that would ensure Trump’s place on the right hand of God. Cthulhu. Whatever it happens to be.

Mechanochemistry:

Mechanochemistry refers to the coupling of chemical reactions with mechanical forces. [“Mechanochemistry: Fundamental Principles and Applications,” Wiley Advanced]

Noted in “How an ancient alchemy technique is transforming modern chemistry,” Hayley Bennett, NewScientist (24 May 2025, paywall):

Chemistry creates many of the wonders of modern life, from the medicines that heal us to the screens with which we communicate. When researchers want to make these things from scratch, they often start by assuming they must dissolve their materials. But mechanochemistry, the burgeoning field [Tomislav Friščić of the University of Birmingham, UK] is fascinated by, shows this isn’t always necessary. “Mechanochemistry gives you the intellectual freedom to think: ‘Let me just try this reaction by grinding it’,” says Friščić. “And, in many cases, it works.”

Bonus!

As well as creating new chemicals, mechanochemistry can be destructive – in a good way. At Utrecht University in the Netherlands, Ina Vollmer’s lab has been meticulous in trying to work out what happens when plastic waste is broken down in a ball mill. Vollmer came to mechanochemistry looking for a greener way to take spent plastics like polyethylene and polypropylene and turn them back into their chemical building blocks. “We were really thinking about it for circularity and recycling, to make these polymers again,” she says.

Such chemical recycling is already possible, but it requires temperatures of around 300°C (570°F), meaning plastics are usually melted and reshaped instead. However, Vollmer’s team recently succeeded at doing it at room temperature using an ingenious milling system in which the catalysts driving the reactions are stuck to the balls themselves. They can throw in pellets of plastic – from old garden chairs and toys, for example – and get out hydrocarbon gases like propene. According to Vollmer, the team is now building a bigger ball mill and founding a start-up to commercialise the process. It is a stunning example of what mechanochemistry can do, says Friščić.

What my reader may or may not have seen:

I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore.

This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination.

Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.

Rumors swirl that he’s on illegal drugs, but I’m not sure that’s the reason, nor that he’s in earnest.

Rather, his workhorse company, Tesla, is facing a drop in demand as liberals and independents are repelled by his antics. So, what does he do?

Disassociate himself.

Although this fine fellow wasn’t all that well lit. I don’t know if his blooms survived last night’s windstorm, either.

Oh, not this old game again! It’s worse than Hey, Pull My Finger Off!

Invitation to a Murder (2023) is somewhat like an Agatha Christie-authored mystery, as six people receive invitations to the house of one of the richest men in the world in the 1920s. They meet on a train to the location du jour, but the focus is on Miranda Green, a florist whose eye for detail is almost unreal. But even she can’t see the connecting feature on these six.

Before long we have our first corpse, and then a second – and my Arts Editor is shaking her head, proclaiming this to be an assemblage of worn-out tropes. But then, a member of the staff dies.

And then we find out … well, that would be telling.

In the end, it has some interesting twists, and Miss Green is not a fading flower, nor a woman with the agenda that an unmarried woman of the age might have had. No nonsense and virtually seeing around corners, she’s rather fun.

But it does feel a bit labored, and the red herrings are really better when they’re not just thrown into a garbage can once deployed.

But it was some fun while it lasted. Good effort. Vivid characters next time. If there is one.

For younger readers, we occasionally talk about rocks in the pockets [of a swimmer], meaning, well, the swimmer is in imminent danger of drowning because of the rock impediments.

Let’s call that my PSA of the day.

That dank old analogy came to mind while reading this WaPo article concerning the report put out by the incompetents currently running the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services – that is, President Trump and RFK, Jr.:

The brave Athenian hoplite time traveler took one look at this video and ran screaming down the hill…

Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) seems to be in that group:

Appearing at a town hall on Friday, Ernst was pressed on cuts to Medicaid – the health care program for low-income Americans – in House Republicans’ budget plan. One audience member shouted that “people will die.”

The usual politician thing would have been to take issue with that premise – or to, as other Republicans have strained to do, cast the Medicaid cuts as merely cutting waste and abuse. (That’s not the full story, of course; the Congressional Budget Office recently projected that House Republicans’ changes to Medicaid, including work requirements for some recipients, would leave 7.6 million Americans uninsured by 2034.)

But Ernst decided to go in a different direction.

“Well, we all are going to die,” said Ernst, who’s facing reelection in 2026.

When hostile portions of the crowd balked at the response, she said: “For heaven’s sakes, folks.” [CNN/Politics]

Too bad the Democrats continue to stagger along in autocrat dress.

And it’s quite exhilarating.

I think, at this point, Defense Secretary Hegseth is accepted by government observers to be profoundly incompetent to his job. He may have been great as a Fox News host, but anything else?

So this report from Steve Benen (because I don’t have NYTimes access) isn’t surprising:

Among those joining [AG] Bondi for the inaugural meeting of the [anti-Christian bias task] group was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who, it turns out, held a related event one month later. The New York Times reported:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth led a Christian prayer service in the Pentagon’s auditorium on Wednesday morning, during working hours, in which President Trump was praised as a divinely appointed leader. The event, billed as the “Secretary of Defense Christian Prayer & Worship Service,” was standing room only and ran for about 30 minutes, with Brooks Potteiger, the pastor of Mr. Hegseth’s church in Tennessee, as the main speaker.

Bold mine, added in case my reader is skimming.

When it comes to being incompetent, it’s vital to legitimize your occupancy of your important and prestigious position, and what better way than to have your boss be divinely appointed?

The light generated by that appointment, or at least the propaganda megaphones, will reflect on their incompetent minions, such as Hegseth, Noem, Luttnick, and so many others, and distract casual observers from the basic shortcomings of these minions by enticing them into casting about for any hints of divine favor for these incompetent.

Never mind how these chronic incompetents subtract all that divine glory stuff from the divine. You can’t tell because, well, God doesn’t make appearances.

So this anti-Constitutional meeting isn’t really about spreading Christianity so much as excusing Mr Hegseth’s vast and profound incompetency. He can impress himself by how much God favors him. Why, God said so during his last appearance.

Didn’t he?

Things will get better!

I took that on a cloudy day. It’d have been better in full sunlight.

Friary:

a building in which friars live [Cambridge Dictionary]

While clear from context, I thought it best to get the exact definition in case there was nuance, which there was not. At least, to the extent we can be exact when there are several distinct sources. Noted in “A new pope confronts his church’s abuse scandal amid praise and scrutiny,” Karin Brulliard, Samantha Schmidt, Jonathan Edwards and Jonathan O’Connell, WaPo:

Although I neither follow nor go out of my way to read Mark Sumner at Daily Kos, when I have read his stuff I’ve generally thought what he writes is rather good. That makes this bit of fury and arrogance all the more disappointing.

In case my reader has yet to run across a reference to TACO, here ya go:

Trump lashed out at a reporter on May 28 who asked for his response to financial analysts embracing a new term called “TACO trade.” The acronym stands for “Trump always chickens out” ‒ a jab at the president’s propensity to impose or threaten steep tariffs on imports, only to later back off. [USA Today]

He seems a trifle touchy.