Monthly Archives: October 2020

Phantasmagoria:

Phantasmagoria (American pronunciation (help·info), also fantasmagorie, fantasmagoria) was a form of horror theatre that (among other techniques) used one or more magic lanterns to project frightening images such as skeletons, demons, and ghosts onto walls, smoke, or semi-transparent screens, typically using rear projection to keep the lantern out of sight. Mobile or portable projectors were used, allowing the projected image to move and change size on the screen, and multiple projecting devices allowed for quick switching of different images. In many shows the use of spooky decoration, total darkness, (auto-)suggestive verbal presentation, and sound effects were also key elements. Some shows added all kinds of sensory stimulation, including smells and electric shocks. Even required fasting, fatigue (late shows) and drugs have been mentioned as methods of making sure spectators would be more convinced of what they saw. The shows started under the guise of actual séances in Germany in the late 18th century, and gained popularity through most of Europe (including Britain) throughout the 19th century. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “So, while we’re waiting . . . will Mike Pence ever be president?” Ben Terris, WaPo:

There won’t be any boat parades for Pence, but not all roads to the White House go through a marina. He might not call for the jailing of his political foes, but he might well find success in selling Trump’s phantasmagoria of “American carnage” — antifa mobs, police abolitionists, immigrant caravans, a new Red Menace — to voters who are more comfortable with a milder messenger.

This looks interesting:

An AI system can produce magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans with only a quarter of the data normally required, which could speed up the scanning process.

MRIs are created by placing a person inside a machine that scans the body and are often used to image brain development or muscle and tissue injuries. The speedy AI-based system, called FastMRI, was developed by researchers at Facebook AI and NYU Langone. It was trained on thousands of images gathered from 242 people.

The team then used the new system to create MRI scans of 108 people’s knees using 75 per cent less data taken during the scan to generate the finished image. The AI reconstruction uses less actual data, resulting in less time in an MRI machine. It manages this by filling in the “gaps” based on the images it was trained on.

The team then gave the 108 FastMRI scans to six radiologists, five of whom couldn’t distinguish them from MRI scans obtained using the traditional method. [NewScientist, paywall]

I get to spend another 45 minutes in an MRI machine in order to check how a cyst on my pituitary gland is changing, if at all, after pandemic vaccines are developed and approved, so something like this is interesting, if too late to reduce in my particular case.

But I do worry that the data of interest will reside in the gaps filled in by the machine learning algorithm. They don’t really address that possibility in this relatively short article.

I’ve been mulling Erick Erickson’s missive of yesterday and what it reveals about the far-right, but I’m not really sure what to pull out of it that he might acknowledge. Here’s the first paragraph that caught my attention:

I voted straight Republican this year except for my local sheriff and district attorney, two positions I do not think should be partisan anyway. I would not vote for a politician who supports abortion rights. Abortion is a euphemism for legally sanctioned murder. I would not vote for Joe Biden, a man who I think actually is nice, but whose policies are terrible and will wreck our recovering economy.

The abortion position remains an unreasoning emotional position. I’ve spent quite some time trying to reach it logically, and it doesn’t work. Either every bit of sperm is sacred, as a certain group of comedians once said, or his position is arbitrary. That he uses it as the single issue on which he rejects the Democrats is desperate and, arguably, un-American.

But his position on Biden is far more interesting. If Biden and the Democrats do, in fact, win mastery of the Executive and the Legislature, then I would encourage Erickson, and all serious anti-Biden voters^[1], to sit down and write out what’s going to happen that they believe will be bad for the country. It’s necessary to be both honest and fair; by the latter, I mean, using a hypothetical analogy to President Trump, recognizing that if Trump had supplied the proper leadership to close up the country early, the economy would still have gone down before recovering, and that would have not been fair game for the Democrats. Some roads lead into valleys before reaching the heights.

So write them down and, in four years, honestly evaluate them. For those regarding expertise that you don’t have, seek out non-partisan sources for help – sources such as National Review are not acceptable. If your expectations have been fulfilled, celebrate! Your mental model of politics, society, and the economy works.

But if your expectations are proven wrong? You have a few choices:

1. Walk away. Become an independent who is aware of your shortcomings, and work to resolve them.
2. Stick around and try to correct the far-rights’ misconceptions.
3. Stick around and take advantage of the other far-right denizens.
4. Stick around and marinate in the far-rights’ conspiracy theories.

Similarly, if my reader is a far-right conspiracy theorist, and of far right conspiracy theories there appear to be quite a few, I would encourage my reader to take a similar action. For example, using one conspiracy theory I ran across, you could write down your expectation that within six months of Inauguration Day President Biden will be sidelined through Vice President Harris’ inappropriate use of the 25^th Amendment.

List more than one, as that makes your study statistically significant, and if they all turn out negative, maybe it’s time to walk away.

The second paragraph, far removed from the first:

Stop nodding and agreeing, Democrats. Your morally corrupt, atheistic precious Obama did the same thing. He persecuted nuns and gave license to local authorities persecuting Christian bakers and florists and also gave license to sympathetic Christians and “Christians” to claim it isn’t really persecution because no one got shot in the back of the head.

Skipping the part where Obama has always claimed to be Christian and attended church regularly – unlike Trump, whose attendance is reportedly desultory – I’d like to focus on his derogatory use of the word atheistic. I don’t think the far right will ever welcome, or even accept, those who have embraced the concept that there is no spiritual realm, no divinities, who believe we evolved, and as individuals we come to life in understandable biological processes, live for a while, and die. I’ve heard, over the years, questions from the faithful about How  can atheists possibly be moral? a question which I think can be answered, once one accepts or at least stipulates to the absence of divinity, and accepts evolution as a working theory.

Source: Pew Research Center

But that morality can be constructed in a secular fashion cannot be accepted by the faithful, as it destroys a key part of the mythology of the divine, at least in Christian circles, as symbolized by the Ten Commandments – the gift of the rules of living. Given the gradual sinking of Christianity’s standing in American society, and the concomitant rise in popularity of the ‘nones’, as they’re collectively called, I have to wonder if far-right extremism is going to continue to be a growing problem in American society. Their opposition, in the absence of religious teaching of tolerance and love, and their feelings of persecution due to the shrinkage in their numbers and political influence, will result in sporadic far-right violence, paradoxically damaging Christianity, both bad parts and good, by its very existence.

Erickson’s worries about ‘persecuted bakers’ has a slight bit of merit; I’d prefer to see the bigoted bakers, as history will judge them, simply driven out of business by customers voluntarily going elsewhere, rather than legal authorities using the power of the State. It would drive home the fact that accepted the morality, nation-wide, is that homosexuality and the freedom to marry is now accepted; that condemning homosexuals, however well meant, over an immutable characteristic, is unjust and results in impairment for those so targeted, or to be graphic: they could be hurt or even dead due to the attitudes of these bakers over which he worries. Erickson may carp that it’s immoral according to the Bible, but then we don’t stone witches any longer, either. Morality, at least that listed in the Bible, has never been immutable; whether or not homosexuals are evil or not mentioned in the Bible becomes irrelevant when the standards of justice, as we understand them today & tomorrow, disagree with the Bible. We’re not a Christian nation; we are a Christian-influenced nation, which means we get to throw out the bad bits as they’re discovered. And that’s good for us. Of course, some of the good bits are temporarily discarded as well, as we see with the birth and growth of prosperity churches, an abomination of the Christian faith as far as this agnostic can see. I hope the realization that judging folks by their (self-proclaimed) financial worth, and that God will judge you by the same, is simply a road to disaster will come sooner than later.

Erickson continues on with some concerns, unknown to me, about nuns and persecution, probably having to do with abortion – because what doesn’t with him? – and thus it permits him to be bitter that the country hasn’t turned to evangelical Christianity as its saving grace.

Your side is burning down America with an American press blaming Donald Trump when it’s your activists and leaders encouraging it. And your last guy played with cigars and interns in the Oval Office and you made so many excuses for him that you incentivized a whole lot of the present President’s supporters making excuses now. But God forbid we point that out and make you confront it or point out some of you only apologized for it as an expedient way to now move on to criticizing the present President’s flaws.

The problem for Erickson is that he has to find a moral failing on the left equivalent to that of White Evangelicals desperate clinging to President Trump, in spite of his worldliness, profligate sinning, and profoundly awful incompetency. So Obama becomes an atheist and a persecutor of nuns, rather than just a member of a different Christian sect. Clinton – at least, I think he’s referring to the former President – had consensual sex outside of his marriage with an intern, which was a very poor choice by him due to the power relation between them, but not an unique or even unusual practice for those in positions of power, regardless of their political persuasion^[2], throughout history and largely regardless of the identity of the power structure. Erickson’s bitterness is a little hard to take seriously in the face of Clinton’s successes, while Trump’s many moral failures – lying, caging children – easily eclipses Clinton’s failures.

The thing is, I think Erickson’s in earnest.

I’ll give up on this, simply noting that the ‘nones’, of which I’m certainly a default member, will still face a rocky road ahead of them if they seek political power, i.e., contribute to the leadership of the country. There have been very, very few acknowledged atheists or agnostics in Congress or the Executive branch; it’s almost a requirement that one exhibit some sort of religious observance in order to be accepted by the American electorate.

One can only speculate on the magnitude of the cost of this bigotry, exhibited throughout the political spectrum, to the nation. How much political talent has not been of use to the United States because of this notion that only the religious can exhibit moral behavior?

It’s the same question that racial bigots and misogynists cannot answer without referencing ideology or theology of extremely dubious quality.

¹ As contrasted with those Trump voters who are voting for him simply to get the Democrats’ goat. They are not serious citizens, and are not amenable to the liberal democracy’s great advantage over competitor political systems, reason. Which, come to think of it, appears to apply to the far left as well.

² I must confess Erickson’s cigar reference escapes me, even though I remember wearing a Halloween costume featuring the cigar, and my companion wore a frock.

Gantlet:

noun

1. Railroads. a track construction used in narrow places, in which two parallel tracks converge so that their inner rails cross, run parallel, and diverge again, thus allowing a train to remain on its own track at all times.
2. gauntlet² (defs. 1, 2, 4).

verb (used with object)

1. Railroads. to form or lay down as a gantlet:
   to gantlet tracks.

Noted in “Kamala Harris knows things no vice president has ever known,” Monica Hesse, WaPo:

This isn’t because men can’t be compassionate and sympathetic to women’s issues. Of course they can. But in the entire history of the United States we have only had presidents and vice presidents for whom the experiences of women are known and understood secondhand, if at all. And there is a difference between being sympathetic to women’s issues and knowing that, if a condom breaks, you are the one who is going to be walking into a medical clinic through a gantlet of protesters screaming that you are a murderer.

The definitions of gauntlet also don’t work, at least according to Dictionary.com.

A super-typhoon with 180 MPH winds!

#Goni has undergone explosive rapid intensification in the past 24 hours: +70 kts (80 mph) and dropped 71 millibars (!). It is now a 175 mph (1-min avg sustained) Category 5-equivalent Super Typhoon. This is the strongest tropical cyclone on Earth, thus far, in 2020. #Philippines pic.twitter.com/skGrtYLX7r

— Steve Bowen (@SteveBowenWx) October 30, 2020

I’m awfully glad I don’t live in The Philippines. Makes me wonder if all able ocean going ships in harbor there have made a beeline for safer waters.

Kevin the Chingford Peacock:

About this morale-boosting wild peacock here.

This is the last part of an occasional series examining President Trump’s progress against Candidate Trump’s promises.

The promise: Candidate Trump promises to hire “only the best” to work in his Administration:

“I’m going to surround myself only with the best and most serious people,” he told our Robert Costa in a phone interview at the time. “We want top of the line professionals.” [WaPo]

Results So Far: To use the phrase “utterly dismal” is not to go too far. Names such as Pruitt, Zinke, Wolfe, Price, Sessions, Whitaker, Barr, Ross, Azar, as well as the many worse-than-useless political commissars at NOAA, VOA, and other important government agencies come immediately to mind for their incompetency, their corruption, and the far-right ideologies they either hide behind, or to which they actually adhere. For the latest, go here.

The Bigger Picture: A President is strictly limited in their efficacy by the people they nominate or appoint. A President can have the best or the worst possible policies, but if their people simply can’t do the job through ignorance or incompetence, Presidential goals cannot be accomplished, good or bad.

So this may be the most important job of any President, and President Trump’s failures in this regard will condemn his Administration to a position in the “Worst Five Presidential Administrations” for a long, long time to come.

In this post, I suggested that folks such as Erick Erickson, as well as Associate Justice Brett “Way Too Sloppy” Kavanaugh, who think that Election Day is a fine day to stop collecting and counting mail-in ballots, are impairing voters who choose to – or must – use mail for sending ballots, whether it’s because they’re overseas, such as serving military, or facing daunting circumstances: weather, or more malicious circumstances, which slow or stop the mail.

Steve Benen has a post that reinforces my point, as he rounds up several debates that, if they had occurred as planned, would have been too late for voters to trust in mail delivery. Here’s one example:

But perhaps even more dramatic was a debate in Georgia this week, in which Jon Ossoff (D) humiliated incumbent Sen. David Perdue (R) — more than once. The two were scheduled to meet again for another debate last night, but that didn’t happen. …

“Last night” being October 29th, and we here in Minnesota have been warned that, as of last night, do not try to mail your ballots – they will arrive late and not be counted. (Hint, hint!)

Similar remarks apply to the Senate contests in Louisiana, Kansas, Mississippi, and Alabama, at least – and that’s only Senate races. What about debates of House candidates, gubernatorial, hell even city council spots?

Look: These arrogant claims that voters should make up their minds and mail in their ballots early disregard the independent voter who, in a normal election, may in fact still be making up their minds. Sure, this election is not normal – this is the only election, in my lifetime, that I can think of that turns on morality and not issues – but that should not matter. Rules should be made for the general case, and in the general case American Independents have a long history of repeatedly changing their minds.

And that’s a good thing.

So impairing a class of voters, for any reason whatsoever, is not tolerable. Kavanaugh and Erickson should immediately retract their opinions and apologize. This is a real injustice, and they should be ashamed of the position they advanced.

These days, the veterinarian has us come to the office, call them, they come scurrying out and grab the cats, and then we sit and wait while they do the necessaries.

While sitting, one of those big Yukon trucks motored in. Speculation began with them bringing in their pet elephant, but eventually we worked our way down to … their pet fly.

Arts Editor: Oh, doctor, doctor, my fly’s wing has an owie!

Me: Hmmm, yes, yes, I see it. A little tear. Nurse John, hand me that … stapler.

Arts Editor: Augh!

Me: Never worry, ma’am. (Raises hands, slams stapler.) And there we go, good as new …

Arts Editor: He appears woozy!

Me: Oh, that’s just the PTSD. For a fly, that lasts about five minutes.

Jon Ossoff and Senator Perdue (R-GA). It seems that Ossoff is spearing Sauron himself here.

Sen. David Perdue is out for himself — not for our health. pic.twitter.com/zbtmw6rU4Q

— Jon Ossoff (@ossoff) October 29, 2020

The dangers of the epistemic bubble is that you may end up looking the idiot when you’re outside the bubble.

Over the campaign various experts have complained that the Trump campaign may be one of the most incompetent to ever grace the United States, and while that’s easily enough explained as the result of chronic amateurism, sycophants, and third-raters, there is another hypothesis:

A desire to lose. For example,

The rallies have themselves become a symbol of his “reckless” approach to governing, said Guy Cecil, who leads Priorities USA, a liberal group that has blanketed the airwaves with advertisements against Trump on the pandemic.

“He’s making people less favorable and less open to voting for him,” Cecil said Wednesday. “He is actually hurting himself by traveling around the country holding these rallies.” [WaPo]

And that’s just one of several I’ve stumbled across. It’s as if he hates the job of actually governing, even if he loves campaigning.

Yet, Trump’s ambition and loathing for losers is well known, so that goes against the hypothesis.

But Trump may be doing a risk/reward calculation and may feel that he’s drained about as many resources as he can hope from the Federal government; sticking around leaves him open to another impeachment, followed by prison if he doesn’t leave the country immediately.

So it’s not utterly implausible that, having no loyalties but to himself and his family, he’s simply arranging his leave-taking from the government.

I’m still looking for him to leave the country before his legal protections disappear.

In a recent decision concerning whether or not Wisconsin can count votes with a pre-election postmark, but received post-election, Associate Justice Kavanaugh made a mistake in reference to Vermont election law, and the Vermont Secretary of State requested it be resolved:

We have formally requested that #SCOTUS correct the erroneous claim by Justice Kavanaugh that #VT has not changed voting procedures for the #2020Elections due to #COVID19. When it comes to issuing decisions on the voting rights of American citizens, facts matter. pic.twitter.com/cWvAJTuIEl

— Vermont Secretary of State’s Office (@VermontSOS) October 28, 2020

Which wouldn’t be so bad, except that it appears that Kavanaugh’s opinion is riven with errors, as Mark Joseph Sterns spells out. and (I haven’t read this) Tierney Sneed also noted.

In view of these flaws, along with the pure insanity of the decision as I detailed here, and since Vermont doesn’t have a finger in the litigation, perhaps a second letter, requesting the Associate Justice change his vote, is in … order?

It may not be legally possible, but it’ll focus yet more attention on a badly flawed decision which is hostile to voters, regardless of political persuasion.

National Review continues to carry a torch for President Trump. Kyle Smith, for example, is talking up a couple of outlier polls:

The Trafalgar Group’s Robert Cahaly is an outlier among pollsters in that he thinks President Trump will carry Michigan, Pennsylvania, or both, and hence be reelected with roughly 280 electoral votes. (I explained his thinking here.) Last week another pollster, Jim Lee of Susquehanna Polling and Research, echoed some of Cahaly’s points about shy Trump voters being missed by pollsters. “There is definitely a submerged Trump vote,” Lee said. Asked for a prediction, he hedged a little but then predicted a Trump win: “I can’t call it. If the turnout is going to be what I think, Trump wins it.” …

In a recent interview for WFMZ, Lee elaborated, saying, “When pollsters get the results back and they look suspicious, or they should, because they’re showing one candidate with a double-digit lead in a state that was carried by one candidate by, you know, a point or two, they should realize something’s not right and that’s where the art of polling comes in.” Lee calls attention to what he describes as “garbage polls” showing a double-digit lead for Joe Biden in the past few weeks in Pennsylvania. He sees this as a replay of 2016 and adds, “I called on the American Association of Public Opinion Research to crack down on egregious polling to tighten standards for firms that clearly don’t understand the landscape of Pennsylvania.” (According to the FiveThirtyEight survey of pollsters, Franklin & Marshall is more reliable than Susquehanna.)

It’s fun to talk about embarrassed Trump voters dotting the landscape like kudzu, but I think there’s a lot of politicians and pollsters fooling themselves this time around. While some Republicans may be trying this ploy as a strategic matter – a bit of foolishness that may do more damage to their side than to Biden voters –  there’s little reason to really believe Trump voters are embarrassed. After all, are the pollsters going to shame them if they say so? No professional pollster will betray any emotion beyond a bit of gratitude for answering the questions. The whole concept seems silly.

For my money, the two best applicable polls are the 2018 midterms, which saw Trump and his allies take a real beating in the House even as they gained a couple of highly unstable seats in the Senate, while Democratic accomplished gains in State legislatures such as Virginia’s, and the 2019 Wisconsin special election last spring, which saw a mediocre Republican voter turnout get beaten by an angry Democratic turnout that resulted in a Wisconsin Supreme Court shocker.

The last poll is coming, though. If you haven’t voted, get out and get it done!

From WaPo:

Poitrine (French):

(Anatomy) chest
J’ai mal à la poitrine.  My chest hurts. [Collins Dictionary]

Noted here.

People are imperfect, but the standards we put up? They are. When the two come into conflict, it can lead to some unfortunate behaviors. Eve Fairbanks remarks on the “shy Trump doubters,” and tries to explain your MAGA neighbor may not be the temporarily insane person they appear to be:

Democrats seemed to display an “extreme moral vehemence” matched with a vehement denial that they were intolerant. “I thought there were a lot of people going around saying things they didn’t really believe. They didn’t seem to feel any contradiction between their own conspicuous consumption and their leftism.” Her perception was that they frequently demanded apologies from conservatives, but “the apologies never did those people any good.” President Bill Clinton was a prime example of this double standard; he represented a party that insisted it — and only it — supported women’s empowerment while he preyed on a female intern. [The New York Times]

Which is certainly congruent with the views I often run across from progressives, which can be quite grating, if understandable. Of course, in turn Democrats have some quite valid grievances concerning Republicans, such as lionizing failed SCOTUS candidate Robert Bork, with the eponymous “borked” as shorthand for being denied a position on SCOTUS for no good reason.

Never mind that denial was bi-partisan (seven Republicans joined the Democrats in rejecting the nomination), and he was the hatchet-man of dubious morality in the Saturday Night Massacre. I will note that whether or not it was public knowledge that he had taken a bribe to do the deed is not known to me; but his role was sufficient to reject his nomination, which looked like a reward for bad behavior^[1].

But there it is, being borked is in the political lexicon.

This is why I don’t join political parties; the necessary moral degradation doesn’t seem worth the dubious pleasures of paying dues and going to conventions. Maybe it’d be good that the morally indignant are in the Party, stepping on the toes of the zealots who try to whip up Party loyalties. It’s not in my appetite, though.

Back to Fairbanks:

Not long into the Trump presidency, though, my relative began to talk about what would happen if he were “driven out of office.” Other Trump-supporting friends used this phrasing, too, and I began to wonder if it was a sublimated yearning. It would accomplish two things: first, make Mr. Trump a martyr to leftist intolerance, and second, get him out of office.

The problem is that Fairbanks doesn’t present any scholarly evidence: polls or that sort of thing. She takes some personal experience and tries to suggest that it may be true nation-wide.

Which I sometimes do. It’s a fun game, and sometimes it’s even right.

And how it’ll affect the election results? Probably not at all.

¹ And Bork’s replacement, Anthony Kennedy, was confirmed without dissent. The Democrats wanted competency; the Republicans wanted to reward moral incompetency. The bi-partisan rejection revealed a party in the process of mutating from responsible governance to grasping for power.

Weak tea, indeed.

Begin with some mood-altering chemicals. Once you’re blurry, you may be ready for The Last Lovecraft: Relic of Cthulhu (2009), a fairly awful rendition of the goofy nerds vs the minions of the Most Evil Creature Ever Spawned scenario. When asked to guard the relic of Cthulhu, Jeff must discard his job at Sqryly Gifts and put forth his manly strength to save the world.

Make sure you drink at every instance of violence. It’ll help you get through this sub-par effort.

And don’t forget to mourn Gary. Fish-bait Gary. I wonder how the audition for his role went.

By the end, if it all works out, you shouldn’t remember a thing.

Steve Benen has a rant about the Republicans’ hypocrisy with regards to SCOTUS appointments and ends with this:

And when GOP senators howl about Democratic indifference toward norms, traditions, and values, and demand to know why the new majority is governing in such a maximalist way, it will fall to Democratic officials to say, “Because we can.”

But, really, it should have been this:

And when GOP senators howl about Democratic indifference toward norms, traditions, and values, and demand to know why the new majority is governing in such a maximalist way, it will fall to Democratic officials to say, “Because you told us to.”

Benen’s version shuts down the conversation. Mine continues it, and that works against the Republicans because they can’t run their mouths without stumbling over hypocrisy and lies.

Our old partisan Erick Erickson is taking up the fine art of ignoring the obvious in the usual e-mail:

Now we have a week till election day. The race is close. Democrats are privately growing confident in winning the presidency. The Senate is really up for grabs. The House will probably be a bit more Democrat leaning in a week. I am most interested in state legislatures due to redistricting, but have no idea how that will play out.

What I do now, and there’s no reason to write a thousand words on this, is that ballots should not be accepted after Election Day.

I don’t care that you took the time to get it postmarked by Election Day. If you really care about your vote, get your damn ballot in on or before Election Day.

Dragging out the Election so some slackass who waited until Election Day to drop his ballot in the mail is irresponsible. Have you not been paying attention to the kooks, conspiracists, and rabble-rousers out there? If states keep changing votes based on ballots that come in after Election Day, the paranoid on both sides are going to destabilize an already volatile situation.

All the while ignoring the real-world problems of weather, interference by outside forces, and even interference by internal forces. The voter, prior to mail voting, had all the time up to Election Day to consider their choices; why should the mail-in voter have less, especially if they are, say, immobile? Why does Erickson insist on penalizing those voters who feel that mail-in voting is far safer than in-person? Does he hate the disabled? (No, of course not; his emotional needs are in the political realm.)

But notice how Erickson is forced to rely on emotional prose to take and keep the reader’s attention. His use of slackass to denote an undecided voter in the general situation – perhaps a scarce commodity in our particular election – is the remark of the zealous partisan who cannot conceptualize a voter who analyzes issues and policies, rather than engaging in the cult practice of backing the leader, no matter what their flaws.

Even if they’re gaping abysses.

This emotional prose serves to conceal another logic error:

Ballots need to be in the hands of elections officials on Election Day or the worst tendencies of a lot of people on the left and right will get amplified online and spill offline in dangerous ways.

Which is to say, they’ll believe that fake ballots are being mailed after Election Day.

Yeah, think about that for a moment.

I won’t bother with the defense that fake ballots have never been successfully submitted en masse, as that’s better asserted by actual experts, and any scheme put together by humans can be picked apart by humans.

No, let’s ask the easier question:

Why do the fakers wait until after Election Day to send fake ballots?

Are they idiots?

If either side is planning on acting out, being un-American, and generally getting their asses arrested or shot-off, late ballots are not the problem. The political atmosphere promoted by our national adversaries and their domestic clients are to blame.

In the end, Erickson’s mail’s real purpose is simply to tap-tap-tap away at the abyss between conservatives and liberals. It’s how you cement your audience into place, by not letting them have any respect for each other.

And it’s a real shame.

On his show on Friday night, MSNBC’s Brian Williams extended a suggestion to viewers. “If you do go out this weekend, please do so safely, and please pay special attention to your surroundings — situational awareness they call it,” the host said. “Look around and look hard, because you can be a part of a great national effort to find the president’s health care plan.” –MaddowBlog

Tired of waiting in line?

A whole mood! The joyful defiance of dancing in line at the polls in a “f*** 2020” Tshirt is what voting in 2020 looks like! Nothing and no one is getting in the way of our joy and our vote! #joyisanactofresistance #joytothepolls @JoyToThePolls #vote #EarlyVoting #TurnUp #Philly pic.twitter.com/2i8gKO1Gv5

— Resistance Revival Chorus (@ResistanceRev) October 25, 2020

WaPo has published semi-interviews with two pro-Biden and one pro-Trump voters who have, perhaps, outsize influence on the electorate. I liked their viewpoints. First up, pro-Trump Pastor Frank Amedia:

On camera, Amedia, who hosts “Potus Shield,” a YouTube series devoted to praise of the president, predicts an apocalyptic future if Trump loses, a time of secular riots and biblical upheaval. But off camera, the preacher seems more anguished than angry, more searching than seething.

“Both sides agree that the soul of the nation is at stake,” he said in an interview. “I know that other nations faltered by becoming divisive, amoral, totally based on personal ambitions and agendas. We seem to be there.”

Amedia believes Trump was chosen by God to lead the United States, but he has no illusion that the president is an admirable character. He laments the “sad political discourse in the country that has developed into a win-at-almost-any-cost mentality.”

“How did we end up with Joe Biden and Donald Trump?” he said. “We’re supposed to have certain ideals and I don’t think either of them musters up to it.”

Amedia’s recognition of Trump’s disastrous flaws is encouraging. Too often, we get complete blindness from the religious right towards the man-child for which they advocate. And he recognizes, at least partially, the importance of the automatic renewal of America – that is, the new generations:

The pastor, 68, wants to believe that the nation’s energetic and idealistic young people will pull the country back from a disturbing rejection of truth, science and faith.

Although he ignores the fact that young people are less and less inclined to be religious – based, I believe, on their observation of the actions of people such as Pastor Amedia.

From the two pro-Biden interviewees, I’ll pick psychiatrist Thomas Singer. He was searching for a picture for the cover of his new book …

Stratum:

In geology and related fields, a stratum (plural: strata) is a layer of sedimentary rock or soil, or igneous rock that was formed at the Earth’s surface,^[1] with internally consistent characteristics that distinguish it from other layers. The “stratum” is the fundamental unit in a stratigraphic column and forms the basis of the study of stratigraphy. A stratum can be seen in almost every single country in the world. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “With a resounding victory, Democrats can protect us from the next Trump,” Jennifer Rubin, WaPo:

Fox News analyst, or perhaps just demented old man, Lou Dobbs:

Lou Dobbs is telling South Carolina residents not to vote for Lindsey Graham pic.twitter.com/vQ67BZZN6P

— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) October 23, 2020

This after Senator Graham (R-SC) successfully rushed through the nomination of Judge Barrett to SCOTUS through the Judiciary Committee.

It’s stunning, but not surprising, that Dobbs would be calling for the second-best Trump lickspittle in the land to be oustered, even at the expense of losing the Senate. After all, you can’t move up the Republican ladder of prestige and power without getting rid of a denizen that’s another rung up.

Importantly, that’s because merit, or competency if you prefer, has no importance in such a system. Only that slippery quantity, loyalty, is the metric. You can only move up the ladder by removing someone ahead of you.

Dobbs looks to enhance this prestige. He looks around. He spies that guy who might be responsible for making Obamagate – a famously undefined fantasy – into a “real boy!”, and denigrates him for, well, not breaking the law and betraying basic honor.

That’s your basic Trumpian cult follower. All that’s important to Dobbs is clinging to Trump’s shin.