Monthly Archives: April 2020

Southern Right Whale.
Source: Hakai Magazine.

Sometimes the solutions to the common tasks of living can be odd. Consider the ingestion and processing of food, from the four stomachs of cows to the baleen of certain species of whale.

And then there’s this shark, thankfully long extinct:

About 310 million years ago some sharks had saws for jaws – and now we know how one of those sharks, called Edestus, fed. The “saw blade” in its lower jaw glided backwards and forwards like the blade on some modern power tools, allowing the shark to cut through soft prey like fish.

We know that Edestus was a very odd shark that grew to the size of a modern great white. It had what look a lot like two saw blades in its mouth – one in the upper and one in the lower jaw. The two blades, which could each be 40 centimetres long but just 3 cm wide, seem to have locked together when the shark closed its mouth, a bit like the blades on a pair of serrated scissors. …

A careful analysis shows that it had a distinctive hinge between the lower jaw and the rest of its skull. This allowed the lower jaw – and its saw blade – to slide back and forth relative to the upper blade, which stayed fixed in place. [Leif Tapanila at Idaho State University and his colleagues] says the lower jaw worked a bit like the blade on a jigsaw power tool. “It pulled backwards during the bite. This raked the upper and lower teeth past the food, slicing and splitting it in half.” [NewScientist]

I regret to say I did not find a picture of the fossil, or an artist’s rendering, that I felt was freely available, so you’ll just have to imagine it for yourself.

And let’s not forget Helicaprion:

Like every plumber will tell you. Professor Tyler Cowen of George Mason University comments on the United States reaction to the Covid-19 outbreak:

“In the United States, as you know, we had a solid two months’ warning and did nothing. And even now, in terms of getting testing and masks set up and the like, there are incredible delays,” he said. “So we might finally overcome those problems. But, you know, with climate change, you need a 20-to-30-year ramping up for it to work.”

Cowen said it’s inexplicable why the federal government, given all the warnings and evidence from China of a spreading pandemic, did not move more rapidly.

“You know, Trump was terrible, but you can’t just pin it on him. It’s far more systemic than that. The NBA [which suspended its season on March 11] really gets so much credit. I would put the NBA in charge of fighting climate change at this point.” [WaPo]

But for those who’ve watched Trump’s moves from Day 1, this shouldn’t be a surprise. Trump has multiple pathways of communication into the bureaucracy: personal behavior modeling, firing personnel who act appropriately, power to nominate Cabinet positions and the influence to get them approved, power to nominate sub-Cabinet positions etc, option to leave important positions empty, use of “acting” personnel to head important agencies.

All of these communicate confusion and fear to the bureaucracy, and that’s why we see the supposedly all-powerful “deep state” having to be defended by our vastly incompetent President for its failures. If it was truly a Deep State, it would have pushed Trump aside and dealt with the matter as the national security threat that it is; instead, Trump remains the incoherent head of the worst Administration in modern memory.

So why is Cowen confused? Beats me. It seems obvious to me that the failures we’re seeing in our best institutions are because they have not received the maintenance that such institutions require.

Which is Amateurs Over All^[1]! And here’s our latest banner-waver, courtesy CNN:

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro on Monday said he was qualified to engage and disagree with Dr. Anthony Fauci on the use of an anti-malarial drug as a coronavirus treatment — which is not yet proven as effective — saying, “I’m a social scientist.”

“Doctors disagree about things all the time. My qualifications in terms of looking at the science is that I’m a social scientist,” he told CNN’s John Berman on “New Day.” “I have a Ph.D. And I understand how to read statistical studies, whether it’s in medicine, the law, economics or whatever.”

Navarro’s remarks follow reports that he clashed with officials in the Situation Room over the weekend about the unproven efficacy of hydroxychloroquine in treating coronavirus. While the task force was discussing the latest on the anti-malaria drug, an exasperated Navarro lashed out at Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, who has urged caution around the drug, a person familiar with the meeting told CNN.

Who knows, maybe hydroxychloroquine will turn out to be our savior. But Navarro’s attitude is telling. It’s the classic I know more than this clown and he spews out his credentials, which conveniently do not include any knowledge specific to the epidemiology field.

It reminds me of the VP of Marketing that was convinced that he could sell brooms just as easily as he could software. It’s a disease of ego. Navarro has his Ph.D. and he’s ready to ride it right over the cliff.

Let’s hope he’s right, since we know how to manufacture hydroxychloroquine and all about its side effects. But I won’t be investing in the manufacturer of it, whatever company that may be. So far, the evidence presented by the Administration is flimsy at best.

¹ Of course, the top-rated theme is The Truth Doesn’t Matter!, but for the purposes of this post we’ll ignore that inconvenient little truth.

Metier:

noun

1. a field of work; occupation, trade, or profession.
2. a field of work or other activity in which one has special ability or training; forte. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in “Jim Al-Khalili’s The World According to Physics is a thrilling ride,” Richard Web, NewScientist (28 March 2020, paywall):

Al-Khalili’s easy turn of phrase and feel for metaphor give us a sense of fundamental physics as a box of delights and woes. His true metier is quantum physics, where he is admirably lucid and even-handed in dealing with the various interpretations that seek to explain its picture of a “fuzzy” reality so at odds with our lived experience.

Stephanie Jolly has drawn some attention from the media for her comparisons of Kentucky, where she is based, and Tennessee with regards to the activity of the virus causing Covid-19. The states are somewhat similar in composition, but the strategies chosen by the State governments have been very different – Kentucky went with early vigilance and shutdowns, while Tennessee was more lax in its approach. She just published her latest results in the form of these two graphs:

So far, it looks like the Kentucky approach is more effective. However, the problems of incomplete and bad data may emphasize the performance gap. Or, for that matter, soften it. Come to your own conclusions.

From WaPo regarding the knowledge that there’s an undercount with regard to deaths from Covid-19:

Postmortem testing by medical examiners varies widely across the country, and some officials say testing the dead is a misuse of scarce resources that could be used on the living.

Penny-wise, pound-foolish! In the Age of Information, it’s a bit astounding to me that someone can actually say such a thing and think they’re being wise, or at least practical. The long-term consequences of flawed knowledge, however, may cost far more lives down the line than the few up front from expending those tests: death rates, correlations with underlying conditions, and other facts can potentially be derived from good knowledge.

If these officials really want to be useful, get behind the effort to make more tests available. Do whatever it takes, tell the President to stop being an idiot, figure out how to get more manufacturers going, qualify more labs, and stop protecting your precious career. This is the day the public official signs up for, when he or she stands up, leads the troops out of the trenches, and charges the enemy with no regard for themselves.

Do your damn jobs.

And kudos to Wyoming Laramie County Coroner Rebecca Reid:

But in Wyoming — the only state that had not reported a covid-19 death as of Saturday — Laramie County Coroner Rebecca Reid said she is ready to test anyone with symptoms who dies at home.

“We need an accurate cause of death to give the family some closure and make sure they have been safe,” she said. “It’s also very important that the public knows the truth.”

She knows.

It was an asteroid made of strawberry jam, and he just threw himself in! But then, he did grow up on a farm.

Dubious science, effects so bad that sometimes I laughed, a mediocre plot with a useless romantic subplot, bad costumes, alien blood made of strawberry jam contained in old vacuum hoses, oh do I really need to go on?

If you’re going to watch War Between The Planets (1966), pray do not make your spouse, or your dog, watch it with you, for that wonderful person, or dog, may have loved you before, but they will not love you after.

Worst of all, it appears to be part of a series!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7U4R3WZy4E

… you have a weak telescope, a smartphone as your astro-camera, and your hands are not entirely steady, doesn’t mean you can’t take a few pics of the moon.

This one’s not too bad, either.

Well, actually, it’s such a mess that I can actually see some dread, blue planet behind it, like it’s a moon of Neptune, the blue gas giant.

Nothing like making a liability into an advantage!

NewScientist (28 March 2020) reports on the latest findings concerning microplastics, about which we know little, including their effects on our health:

Tiny pieces of plastic that pollute the environment can be produced by simply opening a plastic bottle or tearing a food wrapper. …

[Cheng Fang at the University of Newcastle, Australia] and his colleagues tested whether everyday activities could release microplastics. They opened common plastic items such as bags, bottles and packaging film by twisting the bottle cap or tearing the bag, for example, or by cutting them with scissors or a knife, which deforms and fractures the plastic.

The team used a scale that is sensitive to weights as low as one nanogram to collect and measure the microplastics that landed on its surface. Between about 10 and 30 nanograms of microplastic were released from opening the plastic items, which amounts to between 14,000 and 75,000 individual microplastic particles. But the team says that the true amount released is probably even higher, because many microplastics are statically charged and remain in the air.

Not a good finding at all. Or very good. My first inclination is to suggest we return to glass, returnable bottles with aluminum twist caps. But I don’t know how much impact glass bottles would have on natural resources. I know sand for silicon is becoming a little scarce. How about bottles?

So now there are two of these videos of which I’m aware:

My question is this: how long before the entire The Sound of Music (1965) has been repurposed into one or more messages on how to behave in the time of a pandemic?

Someone forgot to inform 3M CEO Michael Roman that politeness is a sign of weakness. This is his reaction after President Trump accused 3M of unspecified maleficence in the manufacture and delivery of N95 facemasks and used his latest club, the Defense Production Act, to tell 3M what to do:

On Lawfare, Professor Gary Corn observes Russia’s reaction to the COVID-19 outbreak as it relates to national adversaries:

As the coronavirus pandemic spreads, the Kremlin seems to be observing the old adage that one should never let a good crisis go to waste. According to several news outlets, the European External Action Service (EEAS), an arm of the European Union, has documented a significant Russian disinformation campaign regarding the novel coronavirus, which causes the respiratory disease COVID-19. The EEAS report asserts that “[t]he overarching aim of Kremlin disinformation is to aggravate the public health crisis in Western countries, specifically by undermining public trust in national healthcare systems—thus preventing an effective response to the outbreak[.]” And now, the New York Times writes that—in classic copy-cat fashion—China and Iran are following suit.

Of course Russia denies the claims. But the reports are consistent with Russia’s broader and well-documented efforts to sow division in the West and undermine democratic institutions—with one major difference. This time, the Kremlin’s irresponsible actions are directly putting lives in danger. This new and potentially deadly twist on the disinformation problem highlights a lacuna in the international legal order and the need for states to take more affirmative steps to better regulate and counter covert deception campaigns, especially those that put lives at risk.

But it’s not a surprising new twist, really. Disinformation continues to emphasize distrust in the government, which is the end result of the Trump Administration in any case.

BTW, I regard statistics coming out of Russia with a lot of doubt, but here’s the latest from Johns Hopkins COVID-19 dashboard:

4700+ infections, 43 deaths. Their population is generally less dense than ours or China, but they still seem awfully low.

Meghann Riepenhoff works in cyanotypes. This is from her Instar collection:

And this is from her Darkmatter collection:

Here’s her website.

From The Sun (UK):

CONSPIRACY nuts are reportedly setting phone masts alight and targeting engineers after a bizarre claim 5G “radiation” caused the deadly coronavirus spread.

The theory originated last month after a video filmed at a US health conference claimed Africa was not as affected by the disease because it is “not a 5G region”.

The myth was quickly debunked after the World Health Organisation confirmed there were thousands of Covid-19 cases in Africa.

The government has also confirmed there is “no evidence to suggest that 5G has anything to do with Covid-19”.

Celebs have been slammed for sharing the conspiracy theory, including Jason Gardiner and Callum Best, who posted similar claims that 5G can impact the immune system.

But the claims have still been doing the rounds on WhatsApp via a lengthy voice note – with phone masts now being set alight in the UK.

My goodness. Well, I suppose when there’s not much you can actually do, latching onto a vague rumor that gives you something to do can be inordinately attractive to some people. I sure hope none of these burning masts fall on these folks, or the first responders required to investigate and remediate.

But these folks need better self-discipline. I read a couple of comments on the article and they were your typical hysteria-inducement types:

top scientists have stated 5g radiation is extremely damaging to life forms. It poisons the body, kills birds and insects and causes cancers and flu like symptoms in humans. Wise up people. Start looking into this!!! They are not crazy to burn down these towers. Join the 5g Facebook page and read the facts!

First thing that comes to mind – who are these top scientists of which you speak? Post links to what they say.

It does come to mind that this may be some national adversary to the UK causing this trouble, too. Spread a couple of rumors and watch the dumb-Brits self-destruct, it’s so much fun!

Assholes.

In the second part of Andrew Sullivan’s weekly tri-partite diary entry, he puts together one of those pity put-downs of the American Evangelist movement that you just have to admire:

The evolution of the Christianist right has been quite something these past few years. In this century, the Evangelical right has embraced the cult of prosperity, the efficacy of torture, and the denial of health care to the poor. They upped the ante in 2016, of course, by embracing a pagan worshipper of Mammon, with a sideline in philandery, cruelty, gluttony, pride, deceit, envy, insatiable greed, and the foulest abuse of women. How could they top that? Well, they’re trying.

And that would be … a cult of death. He cites R. R. Reno, whose article (my reaction here) in First Things was equal parts historical ignorance and lamentations that religious groups are being told not to get together, while failing to note that there isn’t the faintest hint of actual arbitrary repressive element to these bans on gatherings, religious or otherwise.

And then Sullivan provides yet another real-life example of why, despite the arbitrary and, in my view, fallacious basis for any religion, I cannot subscribe to the loathing exhibited by militant atheists:

I’m also reminded of one of the most extraordinary moments in the history of the Black Death. In a northern English town called Eyam, in 1666, the local tailor received a batch of cloth from London that turned out to be infected by fleas carrying the disease. Suddenly, people started dropping dead. Two Christian pastors then made an extraordinary decision: They would quarantine the entire town, forbidding anyone from leaving — so that the plague would spare their neighbors and county. They kept up that quarantine, even as families were wiped out, and never left, losing more than half of their residents, a higher proportion than even London. But the rest of the region was spared thousands of deaths.

Those people, as devout Christians, were indeed not afraid of death. But they faced it because they wanted others to live. I have to say I find their faith a little more impressive than that of the today’s American Evangelicals.

It’s quite the takedown of Reno and, by implication, the screwy ravings of Texas Lt. Governor Patrick. Not to mention a full condemnation of the American Evangelical movement, at least those who’ve pledged their souls to Trump.

Sesquipedalian:

ADJECTIVE

1. tending to use very long words
2. (of words or expressions) long and ponderous; polysyllabic

NOUN

1. a polysyllabic word

[Collins Dictionary]

Noted in the book Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries, Neil deGrasse Tyson. I’ll omit typing in the relevant paragraph.

From the US Government Accountability Office’s report 2019 LOBBYING DISCLOSURE Observations on Lobbyists’ Compliance with Disclosure Requirements:

What GAO Found

For the 2019 reporting period, most lobbyists provided documentation for key elements of their disclosure reports to demonstrate compliance with the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995, as amended (LDA). For lobbying disclosure (LD-2) reports and political contribution (LD-203) reports filed during the third and fourth quarters of 2018 and the first and second quarters of 2019, GAO estimates that

• 90 percent of lobbyists who filed new registrations also filed LD-2 reports as required for the quarter in which they first registered (the figure below describes the filing process and enforcement);
• 95 percent of all lobbyists who filed could provide documentation for lobbying income and expenses;
• 20 percent of all LD-2 reports may not have properly disclosed one or more previously held covered positions as required; and
• 45 percent of LD-203 reports were missing reportable contributions, which was a statistically significant increase compared to prior years.

Except as noted above, these findings are generally consistent with GAO’s findings since 2010. Under a new law, lobbyists are required to report certain criminal convictions. GAO found that, of the 161 lobbyists it successfully identified, no lobbyist had failed to report a conviction.

If you wondered about management of lobbyist ethics, this might be the place to start, although I’m not sure how to contextualize some of the findings:

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia (USAO) continued its efforts to resolve noncompliance through filing reports or terminating registrations, as well as imposing civil and criminal penalties. USAO received 4,220 referrals from both the Secretary of the Senate and the Clerk of the House for failure to comply with reporting requirements cumulatively for years 2009 through 2019. Of the 4,220 referrals, about 41 percent are now compliant and about 59 percent are pending further action.

Perhaps a time series, revealing trends? Or are lobbyist activities such that a violation has a non-linear effect on the system? I’m sure government watchdog groups have a better handle on this than I.

And the how:

To determine the extent to which lobbyists can demonstrate compliance, we examined a stratified random sample of 98 quarterly lobbying disclosure (LD-2) reports with income and expenses of $5,000 or more filed during the third and fourth quarters of calendar year 2018 and the first and second quarters of calendar year 2019. We selected the randomly sampled reports from the publicly downloadable database maintained by the Clerk of the House of Representatives (Clerk of the House). This methodology allows us to generalize some elements to the population of LD-2 reports. We then surveyed and interviewed each lobbyist or lobbying firm in our sample. Our questionnaire asked lobbyists about their income and expenses and accompanying supporting documentation. In our follow-up interviews, we asked them to provide written documentation for key elements of their LD-2 reports.

This documentation included the amount of income reported for lobbying activities, the amount of expenses reported, the houses of Congress or federal agencies lobbied, lobbying issue areas, and the names of lobbyists listed in the report. We reviewed whether lobbyists listed on the LD-2 reports properly disclosed (1) prior covered official positions and (2) certain criminal convictions at the state or federal level as required by the Justice Against Corruption on K Street Act of 2018. We also reviewed whether the lobbyists filed the semiannual report of federal political contributions.

A bit mind-numbing, unless you’re a statistician, perhaps employed by a law firm. Then it’s red meat.

As I made breakfast, I filled my glass with the last of the 2% milk, glance at the wife, shook the empty container, and said, “This is OK, yes?

“Oh, yes, now we can go back to the whole milk!”

Stare at the 2% container. Pause. “Oh, that’s right. We cut this half and half with bourbon, didn’t we? Sure made the Raisin Bran tasty.”

A gagging sound was recorded by the FBI recorders at this time.

Harold Crick, like a lot of people, has his work in the back of his brain, and as a tax auditor for the IRS, it involves counting and numbers. Which is fine.

Except someone is commenting on it. In a slightly snide tone.

In his mind.

And Harold doesn’t like it.

But Harold has a bigger problem: the voice is that of his author, Karen Eiffel, who is narrating his life, and she tip-taps his ups and downs on her old electric typewriter, constructing a masterpiece of literature – although she doesn’t know it. And there’s something else she doesn’t know, or cannot figure out.

How Harold should die.

Dude. I’m a professor of literature. That means I have to shower in public facilities.

Stranger Than Fiction (2006) plays with the barrier between an author and her characters, asking questions concerning art, primarily the priority art takes in the ladder of importance. As Harold tries to understand what’s happening to him, going from therapist to auditee to therapist to, finally, a literature professor, he asks himself Why me? And that leads to questions about the people he audits, and how he can, perhaps, help them.

And how treating them better brings positive results to his own life.

But an offhand bit of literary foreshadowing clues Harold in to the fact that his story is coming to a sudden end sometime soon, and this lends urgency – as if he needed more – to discover if she really exists. When he finds that Eiffel lives in his own city, things become a bit more interesting, as this is one thing she hadn’t expected.

And brings the question of the purity of art vs the value of a life into salience.

This story is treated somewhat lightly, like, say Groundhog Day (1993), and perhaps this is why the final behaviors of Harold, while highlighting the masterpiece of literature which is Eiffel’s work, also might be seen as excusing them from suffering the consequences. But, slightly more grating, the entire ending is plopped in the audience’s lap. To my mind, most stories require an ending, a final commentary on the consequences of the actions of the characters. But some stories ask questions for which there may not be a final answer. Karen Eiffel had thought she was merely writing a story, a serious story, yes, a story that drove her to smoke and stand on the roofs of tall buildings, contemplating long falls, but just a story. Then Harold, who she knows intimately as a good and improving man, knocks at her door.

And she finds she holds the power of life and death over him. The storytellers ask, What should Eiffel do?

But that’s the wrong question. Slyly different is this question: What would you do?

And by providing an answer to the first question, the storytellers lose the opportunity to open a conversation with their audience.

What would you do?

A reader remarks on the similarity of the campaign tactics of Secretary of State Clinton and Senator Sanders:

Because she was a piece of crap liar and he was a socialist…. its time to PURGE through any means necessary the DNC and bring back the old ways instead of destroying the country!

I must thank my reader for reminding me, however inadvertently, that I really should be sending a Thank You note to the Republican Party. As I’ve noted before, the Republicans, through their relentless, and possibly unethical, investigations of Secretary Clinton have effectively and thoroughly cleared her of any wrong-doing, and confirmed that a vote for her was a vote for an ethically clean candidate, which is far more than can be said for our current President.

I do note my reader appears to be slightly liverish, as he has just endorsed violence in pursuit of his political goals. As most of us know, the old ways did not include violence between the political Parties of the United States. There was certainly other forms of violence, usually racist or xenophobic in nature, usually led by benighted racists and implemented by Americans who had foresaken sacred American traditions. But violence was neither endorsed nor tacitly accepted.

And whether or not Sanders is a socialist, it’s worth noting the relative placidity and prosperity enjoyed by certain Scandinavian countries who’ve carefully adopted certain socialist policies. Knee-jerk hostility towards socialism seems unwise, although of course the turgid nature of Great Britain during its socialist period is a warning that socialism is not a panacea, either.

Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives David Ralston (R) is not happy about a plan by fellow Republican and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to permit all voting to occur by mail:

Georgia state House Speaker David Ralston (R) is coming out against a recent effort taken by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) to mail absentee ballot request forms to all voters in the state amid the coronavirus pandemic, saying the move could be “devastating” for Republican candidates. …

Ralston said one of his main problems with the mass-scale voting effort were the possibility of fraud. He also pointed to concerns he thinks voters may have about “breaches of security systems and data systems.” [The Hill]

Sure. But that’s a problem for both parties, and needs to be resolved by the Secretary of State’s office. Especially in view of this incoherent comment:

“So, here, you know, the process keeps going up and up and up and so a multitude of reasons why vote by mail in my view is not acceptable,” Ralston went on, before adding “the president said it best, this will be extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia.”

And neither the President nor Ralston provides any detail on why that should be true, and why it should be part of the debate. If they can find a way to prove that such voting disadvantages Republican voters, they might have something, but so far I haven’t seen anything and nothing comes to my mind in support of it, either.

However, I have a smidgeon of sympathy for this:

At an earlier point in the interview, when discussing the vote-by-mail effort in Georgia, Ralston said he thinks that it should instead be in the “purview of the legislative branch where members of the state House and state Senate” to “consider and debate and discuss and vet these things and then decide if that’s going to be the policy of this state.”

“But to simply have this become an administrative decision made apparently on the fly during this crisis, to me, is just a — is very, very unwise and it’s poor policy,” he added.

I think a debate to decide if it’s a legislative issue or not would be appropriate. I’d like to hear Raffensperger’s response, too, because while to Ralston this may seem like a panic reaction, to me it looks like the Secretary of State looked at the situation and decided that there was no way to ensure the safety of voters using physical facilities, but mail remains safe.

Perhaps Raffensperger just needs to present the safeguards they’ve implemented to Ralston.

Or perhaps Ralston is thinking of how Republicans will lose control of those physical voting facilities.

But they’ll still have the mail-in ballot facilities to control. I’m not sure how I feel about this, now that I’ve sort of thought it through. Are there adequate safeguards on mail-in voting? There’s usually very little actual voting fraud, year after year, but it’s harder to measure vote suppression. Perhaps this is nothing to worry about. Maybe this even gets around vote suppression.

This article in Discover on microbiome, or gut biome, comparisons across species was thought- and visual- provoking, wherein the question is why bats & birds appear to have a bacterial desert in their GI tracts:

[Microbiologist Jon] Sanders and his team think there are several possible reasons why birds and bats ended up with such limited, scattershot microbiomes. Both organisms have short, speedy digestive tracts. Maybe their intestines are so efficient that digestive bacteria don’t help much, Sanders says. And many eat insects, a menu that might not make gut bacteria flourish. The fact that other insect-eating mammals, like anteaters, also had somewhat less-defined gut communities backs up this possibility.

It’s also possible fewer gut microbes facilitates flying. “These animals have profound evolutionary adaptations to decrease weight,” Sanders says. Gut bacteria might be heavier baggage than you’d think. Human intestines carry about a pound of bacteria at a time, and in other animals, gut bacteria account for a higher percentage of total weight. For example, if we had as much gut bacteria as a cow, we’d be lugging around nearly 40 pounds of microbiome, Sanders says. That’s enough weight to slow you down, so maybe it’s worth it for birds and bats to drop as much gut bacteria as they can.

Have they evolved to not require the large microbiomes, to even actively reject them? Or is it the act of flying that keeps their microbiomes small? Very unfortunately, they do not address flightless birds.

‘cuz I’m thinking if it’s just the consumption of insects that eradicates the microbiome, I’m going to have third thoughts^[1] about becoming an insectivore.

And the visual of being a cow in human form … with 40 pounds of microbiome! It may put a whole other spin on Cordwainer Smith’s concept of the Underpeople^[2]!

¹ I’ve been having second thoughts about it for years now.

² If you’re not familiar with the name Cordwainer Smith and have been known to read science fiction, he was one of the finest authors of his era in the field, in my humble opine. No doubt his Chinese background had something to do with his conception of story and myth.

With one chart, any Trump cultist reader is confronted with a question: Do you believe the President is an inveterate liar?

If yes, then you must explain why you embrace such a liar, and, BTW, who taught you that it’s OK to lie nearly as often as you take a breath? I’m not kidding, nor am I being provocative. That’s simply how it is with him.

And if you don’t think he’s a liar, then you have a far, far bigger problem. Here’s the chart of doom (I apologize for its clumsiness, I have not mastered Datawrapper):

What’s this? This is a timeline of Trump’s reelection campaign rallies, along with two dated tags: The one where he proclaims he knew it was a terrible pandemic all along (17 March 2020), and, giving him the benefit of the doubt, a tag only one month before, 17 Feb 2020. What do they show?

They show campaign rallies in Phoenix, Colorado Springs, Las Vegas, North Charleson, and Charlotte, with a total estimated attendance of 62,000. The dates were taken from Wikipedia, the link is in the chart; the estimated attendances were found in various sources, either Heavy.com (which is either pro-Trump or neutral, I couldn’t really tell) or local news sources. But the point, of course, is that a campaign rally is a prime place to spread the virus that causes COVID-19.

That’s right. If President Trump is not the inveterate and compulsive liar that the records show that he is, then he purposefully and maliciously lured his own supporters into a situation where a debilitating and sometimes deadly virus can infect them. And then they could go out and infect all of their friends and relatives.

For my outraged Trump-supporting reader, this is not a pack of lies to enrage you, and, unless you have personally visited a New York City hospital and verified the reports of ICUs being overwhelmed and hundreds dead are all lies, you’re stuck, before God and anything you may hold holy, with a harsh and grating question, and it’s not why you’re not planning to drop out of the Trump cult tomorrow.

IT’S WHY AREN’T YOU CALLING FOR TRUMP’s IMMEDIATE RESIGNATION?

That’s how serious – and simple – of a moral question this has become.

I suggest my conservative readers who’ve made it this far just accept that he’s a compulsive liar, and try to figure out how you can live with that fact, instead. The other proposition – that he deliberately ignored the good health of his supporters – should make you physically ill.

Readers may remember that the process by which the FBI requests domestic surveillance warrants from the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Court was heavily criticized as corrupt. The DoJ Inspector General has completed the review of the process, and Lawfare’s Jeremy Gordon reports:

A new report released by the Justice Department inspector general found errors or lost information in all the FISA applications concerning U.S. persons it reviewed following its report on the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into members of the Trump campaign. Each of the 29 applications sampled for review contained inaccuracies, including missing files in four FISA applications and errors or inadequately supported facts in the 25 other applications.

The FBI’s response?

[Associate Deputy Director of the FBI Paul] Abbate’s letter emphasizes that in many areas, the OIG’s report did not turn up evidence of problems. For example, Abbate notes that the OIG did not take a position on the materiality of any of the errors it identified and did not evaluate whether support for factual assertions missing from Woods Files may have existed elsewhere, such as in case files. In areas where the report did identify problems, Abbate writes that many remedial measures the FBI began to implement after the Crossfire Hurricane report will also address process errors identified in the OIG report, and states that the FBI fully accepts the report’s recommendations. Specifically, Abbate states that the FBI, in conjunction with NSD, will “build on existing accuracy reviews and enhance compliance with the Woods Procedures.” The FBI’s general counsel has directed every relevant division to ensure proper maintenance of accuracy subfiles for all FISA dockets stretching back to Jan. 1, 2015, which “exceeds the OIG’s recommendation” that the FBI do so for all pending cases.

It’d be interesting to know the category of the root cause: managment slackness, technology, corruption?