This is a horrific report on the Catholic Church in Germany:

A jarring report outlining decades of rampant child sex abuse at the hands of greedy nuns and perverted priests in the Archdiocese of Cologne, Germany, paints a troubling picture of systematic abuse in the German church.

The report is the byproduct of a lawsuit alleging that orphaned boys living in the boarding houses of the Order of the Sisters of the Divine Redeemer were sold or loaned for weeks at a time to predatory priests and businessmen in a sick rape trade. The men involved in the lawsuit say as boys they were denied being adopted out or sent to foster families because selling them for rape lined the sisters’ coffers for their “convent of horrors.” Some of the boys were then groomed to be sex slaves to perverts, the report claims.

The alleged abuse went on for years, with one of the males claiming the nuns even frequently visited their college dorms after they had left the convent. He said the nuns often drugged him and delivered him to predators’ apartments. The Order of Sisters of the Divine Redeemer did not answer multiple requests for comment about the allegations. [Daily Beast]

Jarring? Is that your best adjective?

And about these clerics, what are they looking for? Sexual gratification? Monetary gain?

Or what? Did the clerics involved really believe they were doing God’s will? If so, the arrogance is truly appalling.

And that they got away with it. This is what makes it difficult to trust any cleric, regardless of sect.

Ever wonder if whoever took the Parler information is in legal trouble? Parler is the social media platform used by the far-right fringe for discussing their woes and plans before and after the Insurrection. After it was taken down by Amazon Web Services for service policy violations, word came out that someone had found a way to scrape much or all of the information on the users and their posts from it – including deleted information.

Grayson Clary doesn’t think they’re facing any real legal trouble:

It’s worth handling carefully the sort of language that can get a person sued or prosecuted, and the Justice Department has, in fact, tried unsuccessfully to prosecute similar conduct under the federal anti-hacking statute: the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). But what donk_enby seems to have done was really just scraping—automating the collection of the same information that a user with no special privileges could have retrieved by hand—and it can’t be said often or clearly enough that scraping is not a crime. That’s very far from saying, of course, that this conduct carries no risk; unfortunately, the fact that the best reading of the CFAA doesn’t punish this conduct hasn’t been enough to protect scrapers from litigation, or even criminal charges. (As Swift on Security put it, this argument “is not legal advice to enumerate random APIs.”) But the value of the Parler archive highlights, in that vein, the importance of shaking the clouds that still hang over techniques on which journalists and researchers have every right to rely. [Lawfare]

Makes it all feel a little Wild West, doesn’t it? It’s an Either know your shit or don’t come to play deal.

Maybe the best way to think of it is just like garbage cans – put a URL out there with unprotected data on it, it’s legal for anyone who can find it.

Republican Ohio State House members Jon Cross and Reggie Stoltzfus:

Two Ohio Republican state lawmakers want to designate June 14 as an annual state holiday honoring former President Donald Trump.

In a memo sent last week to members of the Ohio state House, GOP Reps. Jon Cross and Reggie Stoltzfus called on their colleagues to co-sponsor their bill, which looks to declare June 14 — Trump’s birthday — as “President Donald J. Trump Day.”

The pair wrote that Trump “against great odds, accomplished many things that have led our nation to unparalleled prosperity.” [CNN/Politics]

That would also be known as the Big Lie. Not only has there been greater prosperity, Trump did very little, rode Obama’s policies and work, and screwed up what he did do.

Good luck, Jon and Reggie! You could be big winners of an Award.

Anamorphic:

Anamorphic describes a projection or drawing that is distorted, though when observed through a particular viewpoint or method, it appears normal. For instance, some artists draw, paint or print a flat image which appears to be distorted in shape and perspective, but when its reflection is viewed in a cylindrical mirror, it appears normal. Another example involves the anamorphic lens, a type of film lens that stretches the image into a wider, higher quality image. Originally, anamorphic was a geological term describing certain types of metamorphic rock. The word anamorphic is derived from the Greek word anamorphōsis which means transformation. [Grammarist]

Noted in “Christmas crafts: How to make your own amazing optical illusion,” Daniel Cossins, NewScientist (19 December 2020):

Anamorphic illusions, from the Greek word for “transformation”, have been popular since at least the Renaissance, when artists like Leonardo da Vinci were experimenting with perspective. Perhaps the most famous example is a 16th-century painting called The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger, in which a distorted shape at the bottom of the picture is revealed to be a skull when viewed from an acute angle.

It also includes instructions on how to do your own anamorphic illusion.

I’ve seen this in a couple of places, and Professor Richardson provides the clearest description:

If there is any need to prove that Trump’s big lie is, indeed, a lie, there is plenty of proof in the fact that when the leader of the company Trump surrogates blamed for facilitating election fraud threatened to sue them, they backed down fast. The voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems was at the center of Trump supporters’ claims of a stolen election, and its owner has threatened to sue the conservative media network Newsmax for its personalities’ false statements. When the threat of a lawsuit first emerged, Newsmax issued an on-air disclaimer.

Today, even as Trump’s lawyers were reiterating his insistence that he really won the election, the issue came up again. When MyPillow founder Mike Lindell began to spout Trump’s big lie on a Newsmax show, the co-anchor tried repeatedly to cut him off. When he was unsuccessful, the producers muted Lindell while the co-anchor said, “We at Newsmax have not been able to verify any of those kinds of allegations…. We just want to let people know that there’s nothing substantive that we have seen.”

He read a legal disclaimer: “Newsmax accepts the [election] results as legal and final. The courts have also supported that view.” And then he stood up and left the set.

I would only add this: This is not cancel culture, the right’s favorite new talking point.

This is Consequences Culture.

As in, you’ve done something bad and now you’re going to suffer the consequences.

You know, what good parents do. Let their kids learn that doing something bad has consequences.

And, finally, I beg of my readers:

DO NO MORE BUSINESS WITH MyPillow UNTIL LINDELL CUTS ALL TIES WITH THE COMPANY.

Actions have consequences. To Lindell and all of his supporters, make sure your actions are just or risk having consequences that you don’t like.

The Gamestop incident may be nearing its end as the GME stock share price dropped 60% today to $90/sh, and a bit more in “after hours” trading. Its high during this episode was $468/sh. A month ago? $17/sh.

It may have a ways to drop. AMC, while also dropping, still has a way to go. Buying now, hoping for a rebound of interest from the reddit army, would take some real brass balls and an appetite for risk greater than mine – and I’m told I’m a few standard variations away from the average when it comes to risk.

Analyses of past and current events are beginning to come in. Here’s CNN:

GameStop stock madness is still going on, now with rogue online investors apparently turning their interest to silver. Silver prices yesterday jumped 13% to an eight-year high after some online investors suggested dumping money into silver would hurt big banks they believe are artificially suppressing prices. However, others believe the new push is being co-opted by hedge funds to move pressure off the GameStop rally. The CEO of Robinhood, the trading app used by some of these investors to buy stocks, says the company’s clearinghouse asked it to pony up $3 billion in capital following last week’s surge — a sign of the intense financial pressure facing the startup.

I’ve always considered the precious metals fiends to be conspiracy-minded, led back in the day by now-retired Representative Ron Paul (R-TX), father of the flake’s flake Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), who advocated a return to the gold standard and was apparently quite vociferous on the matter – without, perhaps, quite understanding it.

But the other half of the analysis, the suggestion that the reddit army is vulnerable to subversion, rings true to me. After all, there’s not much in the way of verification on the Internet, while the operations of communication are greased by the Internet. The possibility of manipulation by larger players seems quite likely. Here’s WaPo on the same subject:

This tale of small investors vs. large institutions also is not as straightforward as it seems. Along with the retail hordes on Reddit, wealthy investors played an important role in GameStop’s rise. The company’s largest shareholders, according to the most recent securities filings, are Fidelity Investments and BlackRock, two of Wall Street’s most powerful players.

Some of the average investors on the popular message boards have financial industry experience, including at firms like Goldman Sachs. And many analysts say that some of those posting on the site are probably institutional investors posing as individuals.

“This is not entirely a David v. Goliath story. There are some sophisticated resources on both sides of these trades,” said Tyler Gellasch, executive director of the nonprofit Healthy Markets Association and a former Securities and Exchange Commission counsel.

The suggestion that BlackRock may be the real power behind the Gamestop, AMC, and other manipulations of company stocks is certainly a believable assertion, and no joke.

This is still an evolving story, and should prove quite interesting.

Governor Jim Justice (R-WV) on the response to the Covid-19 crisis:

“I believe forevermore that it was ridiculous beyond belief to have Democrats and Republicans fighting and couldn’t pass a stimulus package for months,” he said. “It was godawful. That’s just all there is to it. You had people that were suffering that needed to pay their power bill, needed to pay their rent or their car payment.

“At this point in time in this nation, we need to go big. We need to quit counting the egg-sucking legs on the cows and count the cows and just move. And move forward and move right now,” he added. [The Hill]

Egg-sucking legs on cows? I suppose it means something along the lines of near-mythical problems, as in Don’t worry about trivialities, let’s go fix the problem.

Justice used to be a Democrat.

One of the often mentioned talking points regarding former President Trump was his deal-making abilities and his alleged ability to play multi-dimensional chess in the political arena.

Given how little substantive legislation passed under his management, the big droop in American prestige abroad, the loss of the House to the Democrats in 2018, and the Senate and Presidency in 2020, it’s not hard to give him an F+ grade^[1]. His lack of civil engagement with the Democrats, his lack of creative offers, and his lack of stability marked him, at best, as a mediocre amateur; they may have been signs of dementia.

So how is President Biden doing? He and Vice President Harris met with a group of ten Republican Senators last night who have put together a proposal of their own to bring aid to Americans who are suffering in the economic downturn sparked by Covid-19. Following the meeting, White House Press Secretary Psaki issued this statement:

The President and the Vice President had a substantive and productive discussion with Republican senators this evening at the White House. The group shared a desire to get help to the American people, who are suffering through the worst health and economic crisis in a generation.

While there were areas of agreement, the President also reiterated his view that Congress must respond boldly and urgently, and noted many areas which the Republican senators’ proposal does not address. He reiterated that while he is hopeful that the Rescue Plan can pass with bipartisan support, a reconciliation package is a path to achieve that end. The President also made clear that the American Rescue Plan was carefully designed to meet the stakes of this moment, and any changes in it cannot leave the nation short of its pressing needs.

The President expressed his hope that the group could continue to discuss ways to strengthen the American Rescue Plan as it moves forward, and find areas of common ground — including work on small business support and nutrition programs. He reiterated, however, that he will not slow down work on this urgent crisis response, and will not settle for a package that fails to meet the moment.

There’s a lot going on here.

First, Biden and Harris met with the Senators for two hours, a substantial amount of time. Since then, there have been no wild-eyed denunciations by either side. This is how Biden worked as a Senator, reaching out to the opposition to see what can be done. Reaching out implements unity.

By noting that the reconciliation process, by which a filibuster can be avoided, thus allowing the 51 votes possessed by the Democrats in the Senate to be sufficient to pass their own proposal, is available, Biden signals that his first allegiance is to the American citizen, not to undue compromise. He’s concerned that the Republicans may take advantage of the Democrat’s belief that governing is an important duty, which Republicans implicitly dispute and believe simply winning office is the end of the game.

The reference to the reconciliation process also functions as a threat. You’d better make positive contributions, Senator, or we’ll use this generational threat & response as a club to drub the Republicans in the next election. The President and VP know they have the power, so they’re hinting that they’re willing to use it. Biden was a witness to Republican behavior during the Obama Administration, and is unwilling to bend over backward for the Republicans.

By the same reasoning, Biden is showing, very politely, that he is tough. He knows the common citizen is in trouble, and that’s his priority. Playing nice is not part of the playbook.

And all of this is a fulfillment of my first comment on Biden: experience. I still worry about his age, but truth be told, his experience, from his Senatorial career to being Vice President, has equipped him supremely for moments like these. In this simple meeting, he’s fulfilled a number of strategic objectives. If he can get real Republican contributions to the bill in exchange for a small compromise, he looks great in one way; if the Legislature must use the reconciliation process to pass Biden’s proposal, he looks great in another way. All the while, the radical Republicans are at risk for being shown up as a bunch of rank, objectionable amateurs, sheep who don’t know what they’re doing.

And all this without much drama.

This is experience being used well.

¹ The ‘+’ is awarded only out of politeness.

In a post demonstrating repeated flaws, Erick Erickson leads off with this one:

Marjorie Taylor Greene should not be stripped of her committees and the GOP in the House should fight for her to stay on her committees. This is a dangerous precedent the House Democrats are setting and one easily applied to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez whose irresponsible rhetoric about concentration camps cost a man his life as he tried to firebomb an ICE facility.

Democrats want to make an example of Greene because of January 6th and they cannot do it to the overwhelming majority of the GOP House members who sided with Greene in objecting to the Electoral College. So they have to wrap that in Greene’s pre-election views and conspiracy theories.

Erickson conveniently ignores the fact that Greene has publicly endorsed the murder of Democratic officials such as Speaker Pelosi, the fact that Greene has endorsed the QAnon nonsense, which has, among other claims, suggested that a pedophilia ring exists in D.C. that involves top federal government officials, and the fact that she continues to behave in an aggressive manner.

If someone threatened to kill Erickson and rape is wife, would Erickson vote for him to be mayor? If this monster were elected mayor, would Erickson invite the mayor-elect over for a congratulatory meal, and, Sure, you can bring in that rope and gun!

This is truly absurd on Erickson’s part.

Here’s the problem: Erickson doesn’t really believe the conservatives have a moral problem. Oh, he sort of gets it intellectually – sure, he’s written a number of posts questioning the behavior of his fellows. Yeah, he called for the insurrectionists to be shot, even if I think he was indulging in hyperbole.

But, as can be seen in his attempts at moral equivalency in other posts, he still believes the conservatives have the moral high ground, mostly based on the topic of the abortion debate, an issue which is too often results in conversion of typical voters into single-issue voters – the knife in the back of America. His problem? There are no Democratic equivalencies to the January 6th Insurrection. If there ever is, the democratic experiment that is the United States will be in its final, terminal condition – brutal and failed.

So he papers over this rhetorical failure with soft words and sleight of hand.

Look: If an expert in public health policy were elected to Congress, would it be wise to ignore the “previous” experience and put them on the Budget Committee rather than whatever committee would have public health as its responsibility? Has the excellent and lauded service Rep Porter (D-CA) rendered in the previous Congress taught us nothing?

If someone who’s avowedly anti-government and signals they’re willing and able to commit murder of opposition party officials is elected to Congress, they are clearly a threat to the entire Congress. Congress is clearly within its legal as well as moral rights to kick their ass right back out. Either we have standards, or we don’t have a competent government. Hey, and we can let the voters judge the conduct of those who vote for the expulsion of such elected officials. After all, that’s the Republicans’ defense of not convicting Trump the first time. (Yeah, that’s sarcasm.)

There’s so much more wrong with this post, because Erickson made the mistake of covering two or three disparate topics, and doing it badly. His condemnation of the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline needs a remark: If we’re going to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels, it has to start somewhere, dude. His charge of cruelty is specious.

But I’m a working dude myself, and will spare the dedicated reader the rant I can feel bubbling up inside me.

Briefly getting back to the Covid-19 epidemic, this particular bit of statistics is a useful reminder that Covid-19 is not the flu:

it helps to think about what Covid has done so far to a representative group of 75,000 American adults: It has killed roughly 150 of them and sent several hundred more to the hospital. The vaccines reduce those numbers to zero and nearly zero, based on the research trials.

Zero isn’t even the most relevant benchmark. A typical U.S. flu season kills between five and 15 out of every 75,000 adults and hospitalizes more than 100 of them. [The New York Times]

A death rate, in the current medical knowledge and services context, that’s more than 10X the flu’s death rate.

This is in the context of every single vaccine so far announcing results eliminates death as an outcome, which is a very good result indeed.

I assume you would agree that any vaccine that transforms Covid into something much milder than a typical flu deserves to be called effective. But that is not the scientific definition. When you read that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was 66 percent effective or that the Novavax vaccine was 89 percent effective, those numbers are referring to the prevention of all illness. They count mild symptoms as a failure.

“In terms of the severe outcomes, which is what we really care about, the news is fantastic,” Dr. Aaron Richterman, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of Pennsylvania, said.

Chins up, folks, and stay vigilant until you’ve had the jab + 3 weeks.

Following complaints to the media, The Lincoln Project co-founder John Weaver is withdrawing from TLP. There are allegations of his making unsolicited sexual overtures to several young men, including at least one under the age of consent.

Despite the yipping of conservative media and pundits such as Ryan Girdusky of American Conservative and Erick Erickson, I see little to really comment on; I’m just be sad that Weaver was caught up in the old Homosexuality is evil trope.

But I did want to note that Weaver does know how to write an apology note, unlike so many weasel politicians.

Weaver did not respond to a request for comment Sunday. Two weeks ago, he acknowledged the “inappropriate” messages in a statement to Axios and apologized, saying he had been closeted.

“The truth is that I’m gay. And that I have a wife and two kids who I love. My inability to reconcile those two truths has led to this agonizing place,” Weaver said in his statement then. “To the men I made uncomfortable through my messages that I viewed as consensual mutual conversations at the time: I am truly sorry. They were inappropriate and it was because of my failings that this discomfort was brought on you.” [WaPo]

Acknowledgment of error and remorse. This is how you get it done. The conservatives can be all bulgy eyed over this guy, whoever he was on the conservative side of things. Unlike so many of them, he is honest in his disgrace.

Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), that rare animal who is both a Tea Party member and a Republican who voted for the articles of impeachment in January, is experiencing some disappointment with his family:

But the backlash isn’t just among the public and other lawmakers. In a new interview with [Business] Insider opinion columnist Anthony Fisher, Kinzinger says members of his own family have turned on him due to his vote:

“My dad’s cousins sent me a petition – a certified letter – saying they disowned me because I’m in ‘the devil’s army’ now,” Kinzinger said in a phone conversation on Thursday. “It’s been crazy, when you have friends – that you thought were good friends that would love you no matter what – that don’t.” [Yahoo! News]

And I want to know is this: How did Kinzinger respond to these daft relatives of his?

The right wing decepto-mail stream is coming back online, and it’s time to disassemble an example. Here’s the entirety of the email:

It makes President Biden look terribly hypocritical, doesn’t it?

But only if you’re skimming quickly and pre-disposed to believe anything negative about President Biden.

For the properly skeptical reader, one of the very first steps is to ask about the context. There is information provided, to which I’ll stipulate, and then a quote, again to which I’ll stipulate.

I can do that because the two don’t go together, actually.

The Biden quote refers to using Executive Orders (EOs) to implement what should be legislated. As a former long-time Senator, it makes sense that Biden would find the use of EOs to do what was essentially his shared responsibility repugnant, thus the alleged hypocrisy.

But does that applyp here? Here’s CNN’s list of the first 30 EOs. Let’s pick a couple out for analysis. Here’s his first EO:

Directs OMB director to develop recommendations to modernize regulatory review and undoes Trump’s regulatory approval process

That has nothing to do with legislation, but instead directs an Executive Agency to do some research on improving a regulatory process, while undoing Trump’s amateur hour effort. That’s entirely within Biden’s purview. How about the second?

Requires executive branch appointees to sign an ethics pledge barring them from acting in personal interest and requiring them to uphold the independence of the Department of Justice

Nothing legislative here, obviously. Picking at random, here’s #6:

Reverses the Trump administration’s restrictions on US entry for passport holders from seven Muslim-majority countries

Reversing a previous EO requires an EO; again, it’s not a usurpation of legislation. #11:

Cancels the Keystone XL pipeline and directs agencies to review and reverse more than 100 Trump actions on the environment

Again, this is within the Executive wing and is completely appropriate.

For my conservative reader, no, I’m not picking and choosing. These are random selections. I did go through all of them, and perhaps an argument could be made for a single EO:

Fortifies DACA after Trump’s efforts to undo protections for undocumented people brought into the country as children

This would require believing that DACA itself is un-Constitutional, and that is a position that the Federal Judiciary has not taken, despite opportunity.

The lesson here? Believing what you’re pre-disposed to believe will lead you into error. If some piece of mail plays to your inclinations, put on your Skeptical Mask and read it again. In this case, remember: Biden is an institutionalist through and through. He believes in the checks and balances system that is at the core of our government; he believes in divided responsibilities. His whole life has been built around it. He’s been a compromiser as a legislator while passing large pieces of legislature. He knows how things work in Washington.

Why would he suddenly shift to dictator mode?

This sham piece of mail isn’t meant to convince the non-MAGA voter of Biden perfidy; it’s meant to keep the MAGA voter firmly in line by engendering contempt for the hypocritical Democrat.

The only problem: the Democrat is not a hypocrite. Biden, having decades of experience vs Trump’s zero experience, knew to have his aides begin work on how to retract the damage done by Trump and his amateur hour aides from the moment he started campaigning. Biden came in ready: he knows the problems, he knows how to attack them, and he won’t put up with bullshit or playing to snowflake sensibilities.

And that is evidenced by his jump off the sprinters’ blocks.