Antinomianism:

Antinomianism (Ancient Greek: ἀντί, “against” and νόμος, “law”) is any view which rejects laws or legalism and argues against moral, religious or social norms (Latin: mores), or is at least considered to do so. The term has both religious and secular meanings.

In some Christian belief systems, an antinomian is one who takes the principle of salvation by faith and divine grace to the point of asserting that the saved are not bound to follow the moral law contained in the Ten Commandments. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “EVANGELICAL TROLL ERICK ERICKSON TRIES TO THEOLOGIZE CANCEL CULTURE. FAILS.” Daniel Schultz, Religion Dispatches:

Salvation is never “regardless of others.” It’s true, for example, that Paul instructs the Philippians to “work out your own salvation in fear and trembling,” but that’s a way of saying “mind your own business” and even that advice comes in a community setting. Christian scripture and theology is abundantly clear that salvation is for the world, not individual believers without respect to the people around them. Otherwise, we would have justification for antinomianism, and that’s surely not what Erickson wants.

Someone else annoyed by Erickson.

During the recent election, I called for more involvement from our invisible citizens – that is, the corporations who like to fund our politicians. Specifically, I suggested that the move towards autocracy embedded in Texas v Pennsylvania, the relentless but equally ridiculous specious claims of systemic fraud, the claims, revealed to be false, ranging from the corruption of voting machines (still asserted by Trump ally Mike Lindell even today) to, well, all the alleged corruption symbolized by Sydney Powell’s assertion of a revelation called The Kraken, subsequently retracted in the face of a lawsuit, would be bad for business.

To some extent, corporations came through. Sports teams offered their venues for voting on voting day. Other companies offered to let their employees work as vote counters and still be paid.

In the wake of the recent widely condemned – on the left – passage of what is characterized as a voting restrictions law in Georgia, symbolized by an egregious rule against bringing water and food to people in line, had led those working for laws that gave more opportunities for voting rather than less to entreat the corporations to join the team again.

And so I waited. And waited. Their was no real reaction, leading to activists to setup a plaint of concern, as WaPo’s Jennifer Rubin noted:

So far the response has been lukewarm, and unsatisfactory for Abrams and other voting rights advocates. Abrams was emphatic in her demand that corporate America get into the fight. “There were businesses that were silent in the election for whatever reason. But there should be no silence from the business community when anyone in power is trying to strip away the right to vote from the people,” she said on a call Tuesday, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported. She added, “There should be not a single business owner in America who is allowed to be silent about the theft of the right to vote from any American, because that means you are standing with an ethos that was a near coup attempt in the United States. I know that sounds a bit overblown, but I can’t see it any other way.”

Pressure has been ratcheted up by other groups:

“Hey Coca-Cola! The Freedom to vote tastes good to all Georgians,” one of the billboards reads. “Join us: STAND UP for Georgia.”

And, finally, we may be seeing some movement by a Georgia-based juggernaut:

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp launched a counterattack on Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian Wednesday afternoon, just hours after Bastian said the voting bill Kemp signed last week was “unacceptable,” “wrong” and “based on a lie.” …

“I need to make it crystal clear that the final bill is unacceptable and does not match Delta’s values,” said the statement to Delta employees from CEO Ed Bastian. “After having time to now fully understand all that is in the bill, coupled with discussions with leaders and employees in the Black community, it’s evident that the bill includes provisions that will make it harder for many underrepresented voters, particularly Black voters, to exercise their constitutional right to elect their representatives. That is wrong.”

Bastian’s statement continued, “The entire rationale for this bill was based on a lie: that there was widespread voter fraud in Georgia in the 2020 elections. This is simply not true. Unfortunately, that excuse is being used in states across the nation that are attempting to pass similar legislation to restrict voting rights.”  [CNN/Business]

Kemp responded, ineffectually:

“Today’s statement by Delta CEO Ed Bastian stands in stark contrast to our conversations with the company, ignores the content of the new law, and unfortunately continues to spread the same false attacks being repeated by partisan activists,” said Kemp’s statement. He defended measures to require official IDs such as drivers’ licenses, before people can vote. pointing out that before a passenger can fly on Delta – or any other airline – they must produce a photo ID.

A few fraudulent votes will not result in the deaths of hundreds or thousands, as can happen with a plane. Comparisons are a tricky business, especially when the one domain contains documented problems and dangers that the other lacks.

“Mr. Bastian should compare voting laws in Georgia — which include no-excuse absentee balloting, online voter registration, 17 days of early voting with an additional two optional Sundays, and automatic voter registration when obtaining a driver’s license — with other states Delta Airlines operates in,” said Kemp.

Which is another way of saying, Ouch! Why are you beating up on us!

What comes next? Keep an eye on the news. We won’t be seeing titans like Delta or Coca-Cola pulling up stakes and leaving – but they can always suggest that their next big project won’t be in Georgia.

The 2015 reaction to Republicans Acting Badly.

Pressure from other organizations is also possible, as Jennifer Rubin suggested a few days ago. We saw the same happen to Indiana a few years back when it passed legislation threatening the rights of LGBTQ people. We may see more of that.

Companies need to keep in mind that there are more opportunities for profit in a free society, not one that works to limit the franchise unfairly.

Regarding today’s earlier post regarding Rep Gaetz (R-FL), a reader points to a Rachel Maddow segment on Gaetz’s political ally who’s now in trouble of all sorts:

And notes:

You should watch this video clip. I think Gaetz is guilty as hell, given the company he keeps.

And it could be both guilty as the rumors charge and a victim of a political hit job. Greenberg seems to be quite the arrogant slimebag, and, while I haven’t paid that much attention to Gaetz, his behavior during his tenure in office has not inspired feelings of wellness. He feels more like a wind-up attack dog than a mature legislator.

Just like a political machine member.

I was going to skip over the scandal suddenly enveloping Rep Matt Gaetz (R-FL), partly because of a lack of time, and, quite honestly, an inclination to apply the legal axiom Innocent until proven guilty in the case of sex crimes, the pleasures of salacious gossip notwithstanding. For those not aware of it, The New York Times reports:

Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida and a close ally of former President Donald J. Trump, is being investigated by the Justice Department over whether he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old and paid for her to travel with him, according to three people briefed on the matter. Investigators are examining whether Mr. Gaetz violated federal sex trafficking laws, the people said.

But Gaetz himself touches on my suspicions on the matter, which what little I’ve read seems to be mostly ignored,, as reported in WaPo:

[Gaetz] appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show to explain his side of the story.

Here’s what he said, in full.

“What is happening is an extortion of me and my family involving a former Department of Justice official. On March 16th, my father got a text message demanding a meeting, wherein a person demanded $25 million in exchange for making horrible sex-trafficking allegations against me go away. Our family was so troubled by that, we went to the local FBI, and the FBI and the Department of Justice were so concerned about this attempted extortion of a member of Congress that they asked my dad to wear a wire, which he did with the former Department of Justice official.

“Tonight, I am demanding that the Department of Justice and the FBI release the audio recordings that were made under their supervision and at their direction, which will prove my innocence and that will show that these allegations aren’t true. They’re merely intended to try to bleed my family out of money.

“This former Department of Justice official tomorrow was supposed to be contacted by my father so that specific instructions could be given regarding the wiring of $4.5 million as a down payment on this bribe. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that tonight, somehow, the New York Times is leaking this information, smearing me and ruining the investigation that would likely result in one of the former colleagues of the current DOJ being brought to justice for trying to extort me and my family.”

Or, Someone’s out to get me!

And this would not surprise me. The Republican Party is in its end game, and while it’d make sense it’s filled with those outside of society’s norms as well as out on the edge zealots, this is also the time where the knives come out among the power players, fighting over the crumbs that look to get smaller and smaller as the Republicans become less and less relevant, RINOing out competitors with abandon – or besmirching their reputations with hints of sex crimes.

So if Gaetz thinks someone is out to get him – especially in view of the fact that the investigation began during the Trump Administration – I’m willing to keep an open mind and look at this as more evidence of internecine elite warfare.

At least until more evidence comes in.

With the Ever Given refloated and on its way and the crisis over with, here’s the VesselFinder view of the Suez Canal:

Compared to before:

It brings home the importance of the Suez Canal to international shipping.

Sempiternal:

1. everlasting; eternal. [Dictionary.com]

Reader (and occasional contributor) Chris Johnson noted it in “The Last Hours of El Faro: An excerpt from RUN THE STORM,” George Michelson Foy, Soundings:

The ongoing pulse of engines deep below, the sempiternal tremble of deck and joinery that is the sign, tactile as much as auditory, that El Faro’s heart is beating, her engines driving her and all her people in the direction they’re supposed to go in, begins to falter.

Slows in rhythm.

Fades, at last, to nothing.

Perhaps not quite used properly, at least according to the definition I found.

2022 elections are already hoving – heaving? – into view:

Rep. Jody Hice, a Republican, announced last week that he is running for Georgia secretary of state, the state’s top elections job. His 2022 campaign was immediately endorsed by former President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly launched dishonest attacks against the Republican currently in the post, Brad Raffensperger.

And then Hice went on television and made a series of false claims about the 2020 election.

This was not new behavior. Since November, Hice has been a vocal and frequent purveyor of inaccurate election claims — baselessly saying or insinuating that the results were tainted by mass fraud and that Joe Biden did not legitimately beat Trump in Georgia. [CNN/Politics]

While Raffensperger is well-known as a very conservative Republican, his failure to be corrupted by Trump has marked him for cancellation by the Trump cult. The cult – and obviously Trump – is unforgiving in an arena where forgiveness is much more fruitful than the sword.

This can go two ways.

First, Raffensperger can give up and not run for reelection to the Secretary of State office. He may do that in order to preserve the integrity of the Republican Party. Or he’ll take a skip on the hassle of running against a cultist.

Or he runs. Based on Trump’s immature view of politics, I would expect the primary to become a war of no quarter. Winning, at least for Hice, won’t be sufficient; Raffensperger’s unforgivable failure to become corrupted must be punished by complete political destruction.

And Raffensperger won’t be able to restrain himself in his return attacks. This will turn into the worst sort of internecine war between cousins. And that will have consequences, both within the ranks of independent voters and in the Republican Party itself. As more and more Republicans become disaffected, and as the independents are reminded, time after time, of Hice’s idol’s feet of clay, more and more Republican voters may end up sitting out the general election.

And hand the Secretary of State office to a Democrat.

A friend sent me a link to a blog named z///tbd.org, the blog of an artist who has some interesting passions. Like this one:

Compositing Kowloon Walled City Cross Sections

…
I first saw an image of the cross section of Kowloon Walled City in 2014. It is a wonderful illustration of the infamously dense city within a city that once existed in Hong Kong. The attention to detail is extraordinary, with a dozen birds, hundreds of glowing orange human silhouettes, and the outlines of thousands of household objects filling up the canvas. Each room is unique, every shape is different from the others of its type. The messes of television antennae on the roofs initially appear to be trees, while the plants inside apartments are colored solid green, setting them apart from the other hollow, unfilled objects surrounding them.

The busy city shines in its full 4500×1636 resolution. Every silhouette tells a story. As waking arms stretch over a bottom bunk bed, someone else falls asleep outside on the roof. Behind a wall on which a man carrying a large bag leans, a pair of people sit facing each other across a folding table and a small child climbs up on a counter. It’s not clear whether the man with the bag is aware of the people on the other side or if they are strangers to him.

More here.

[H/T MP]

In case you have some free time on your hands and don’t mind playing with electricity, here’s Cameron Duke in NewScientist (20 March 2021, paywall) on the mystery of electric catfish:

By Stan Shebs, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

The electric catfish can emit up to 300 volts to stun its unsuspecting prey. However, the fish isn’t just immune to its own jolts – it seems to be unable to be shocked at all.

Georg Welzel and Stefan Schuster at University of Bayreuth in Germany explored the degree to which electric catfish (Malapterurus beniensis) are insulated from electric shocks, both their own and those from outside sources.

In one test, in which a goldfish and one of the two electric catfish used in these trials shared a tank, Welzel and Schuster coaxed the catfish into discharging its electricity by gently brushing its tail. In another, they used a commercial electrofishing device to give the entire tank a jolt. In both trials, the goldfish spasmed and contorted its body briefly before recovering, but the catfish was unaffected.

“It was absolutely amazing to see how unexpressed and relaxed electric catfish swam through their tank when being confronted with electric shocks that usually narcotise other fish,” says Welzel.

And as it’s thought that the fish hunts by sensing the electric field of prey, it’s not as if he’s super-calloused or something.

Reverse strike:

Nelson was the county executive of Wisconsin’s Outagamie County in 2017 when the Appleton Coated paper mill was forced into receivership by its creditor PNC Bank—one of several mill shutdowns in the Fox River Valley paper-manufacturing region. Appleton Coated was the economic mainstay of the town of Combined Locks, providing it with 620 high-paying jobs and tax revenue, and its managers insisted it would be profitable after it weathered a rough patch of high wood-pulp prices and depressed markets and introduced new product lines. Nelson recounts that PNC claimed otherwise and that it used provisions in a loan agreement to take control of the mill and auction it to another company that planned to shutter and scrap it. Appleton Coated’s community rallied to its cause: Workers staged a “reverse strike” and kept the mill operating; the United Steelworkers Union local representing them filed an objection to the receivership sale in court and set about finding another buyer that would keep the mill up and running; and Nelson filed his own objection in court, citing the economic damage to the county that would result if the mill closed. A heated legal battle ensued, and the mill won a reprieve thanks to concessions from the union and government aid that Nelson pitched in. As a result, Appleton Coated duly made its way back to profitability in 2018. Over the course of this book, Nelson sets the mill’s story against a panorama of Wisconsin politics and economic issues, examining a rash of similar mill shutdowns and accusing Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who served from 2011 to 2019, and the state legislature’s Republican majority of being indifferent to the plight of the paper industry even as it gave electronics manufacturer FoxConn billions in subsidies for a new factory. [“ONE DAY STRONGER: HOW ONE UNION LOCAL SAVED A MILL AND CHANGED AN INDUSTRY—AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR AMERICAN MANUFACTURING,” THOMAS M. NELSON, Kirkus Reviews]

In other words, continuing to work when instructed to not do so.

Mr. Nelson is an early contender for the Democratic nomination to the 2022 race for the Senate seat in Wisconsin, currently occupied by Senator Ron Johnson (R).

Freddie (not Frederik any longer?) deBoer remarks on the non-conservative media profession and how they appear to have taken a dislike to Substack, currently the home of deBoer, Andrew Sullivan, and a few other writers who appear to not have much patience with the woke:

Substack might fold tomorrow, but someone would else sell independent media; there’s a market. Substack might kick me and the rest of the unclean off of their platforms tomorrow, but other critics of social justice politics would pop up here; there’s a market. Establishment media’s takeover by this strange brand of academic identity politics might grow even more powerful, if that’s even possible, but dissenters will find a place to sell alternative opinion; there’s a market. What there might not be much of a market for anymore is, well, you – college educated, urban, upwardly striving if not economically improving, woke, ironic, and selling that wokeness and that irony as your only product. Because you flooded the market. Everyone in your entire industry is selling the exact same thing, tired sarcastic jokes and bleating righteousness about injustices they don’t suffer under themselves, and it’s not good in basic economic terms if you’re selling the same thing as everyone else. You add that on to structural problems within your business model and your utter subservience to a Silicon Valley that increasingly hates you, well…. I get why you’re mad. And I get that you don’t like me. But I’m not what you’re mad about. Not really.

In the span of a decade or so, essentially all professional media not explicitly branded as conservative has been taken over by a school of politics that emerged from humanities departments at elite universities and began colonizing the college educated through social media. Those politics are obscure, they are confusing, they are socially and culturally extreme, they are expressed in a bizarre vocabulary, they are deeply alienating to many, and they are very unpopular by any definition. The vast majority of the country is not woke, including the vast majority of women and people of color. How could it possibly be healthy for the entire media industry to be captured by any single niche political movement, let alone one that nobody likes? Why does no one in media seem willing to have an honest, uncomfortable conversation about the near-total takeover of their industry by a fringe ideology?

Having been a little frustrated at the lack of definition of being woke, it’s good to see deBoer, a former academician himself – I think – noting that it’s a confusing and obscure ideology.

I even find it comforting that I’m not stupid. Or at least more stupid than usual. Formulating criticisms of the confusing only really succeeds at the visceral level.

But I’m not referencing deBoer in order to try to say something clever, but to get the word out, especially here in the Midwest, that wokeness does appear to be confusing, obscure, and, if it remains that way, dangerous to those who adopt it.

And to note that, possibly, the conundrum for the woke is that if it does stand up and define itself, it may find that most of the country, even in its academic strongholds, withdraw support from it, especially if it shows gaps between itself and the principles of liberal democracy on which this country has been built, violated, repaired, etc – I feel it’s important to note that principles upon which we built have often been violated by the greedy, by theocrats, and narcissists, in order to make clear that a heterogenuous country, racially, philosophically, ideologically, will violate, with serious consequences, those principles.

And that does not condemn those principles. It only condemns the violators.

Violent crime may be up in Minnesota … but not in Baltimore?

Something happened in Baltimore last year. The coronavirus pandemic hit, and State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced that the city would no longer prosecute drug possession, prostitution, trespassing, and other minor charges, to keep people out of jail and limit the spread of the deadly virus.

And then crime went down in Baltimore. A lot.

While violent crime and homicides skyrocketed in most other big American cities last year, violent crime in Baltimore dropped 20 percent from last March to this month, property crime decreased 36 percent, and there were 13 fewer homicides compared with the previous year. This happened while 39 percent fewer people entered the city’s criminal justice system in the one-year period, and 20 percent fewer people landed in jail after Mosby’s office dismissed more than 1,400 pending cases and tossed out more than 1,400 warrants for nonviolent crimes.

So on Friday, Mosby made her temporary steps permanent. She announced that Baltimore City will continue to decline prosecution of all drug possession, prostitution, minor traffic and misdemeanor cases, and will partner with a local behavioral health service to aggressively reach out to drug users, sex workers, and people in psychiatric crisis to direct them into treatment rather than the back of a patrol car.

Would this be a universally good idea? I see no reason to think so, actually – but that doesn’t mean it’s a finding that shouldn’t be examined by academics and professionals alike. For example, I’d like to see those responsible for St. Paul and Minneapolis take this result under advisement.

And what did this allow Baltimore to do?

“The era of ‘tough on crime’ prosecutors is over in Baltimore,” Mosby said. “We have to rebuild the community’s trust in the criminal justice system and that’s what we will do, so we can focus on violent crime.” She said the policy shift will enable more prosecutors to be assigned to homicides and other major cases instead of working in misdemeanor court.

My original pointer to this result, TheCriticalMind on The Daily Kos, remarked:

Two benefits of Baltimore’s strategy that should make conservatives happy are one, the savings. And two, it allows the criminal justice system to focus on violent crimes — the crimes that actually hurt people. Americans should know, but it is a fact rarely publicized, that 40% of murders in the US go unsolved. And criminal psychologists know by study — as does any thoughtful person by instinct— that it is not the severity of the punishment that deters the criminal — but the likelihood they will be caught, convicted, and suffer the consequences of their action.

Skipping the gratuitously arrogant remark as does any thoughtful person by instinct, I followed up on this and ran across this National Institute of Justice report, based on an essay by Daniel S. Nagin, which I think can be summarized thusly:

1. The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment.
2. Sending an individual convicted of a crime to prison isn’t a very effective way to deter crime.
3. Police deter crime by increasing the perception that criminals will be caught and punished.
4. Increasing the severity of punishment does little to deter crime.
5. There is no proof that the death penalty deters criminals.

I haven’t reviewed the research Nagin works off of, as I haven’t the time nor expertise, but it’s certain interesting, and not congruent with conservative cant on the issue. But given staffing issues in some localities, the Baltimore approach may be well worth investigating and adopting, in various forms, in other cities.

I look forward to hearing results.

Flatliners (1990) is an odd and, ultimately, ineffectual morality tale. Five medical students in New York City, having a fascination with after-death experiences, begin taking turns at dying and being brought back to life.

This doesn’t go well.

Wright finds himself in a sordid incident in which a boy, hiding in the branches of a tree, is stoned by other boys, falls out, and badly injures a dog – and himself. Pulled back from the beyond, Wright begins to be assaulted by parties unknown, and feels deeply troubled.

Hurley, who is engaged to be married, finds himself in a nightmare sequence in which the women he’s slept with, and videotaped while doing so, keep throwing his pickup lines in his face. Shortly after returning from the beyond, his fiancee becomes ex-, when she discovers his collection of tapes.

Labraccio returns to a past in which he may have participated in the humiliation of a young black girl. This leads him to track her down and apologize.

Manus relives the loss of her father to suicide, which she obscurely believes she triggered by intruding on him when he was about to take some illegal drugs. Pulled back, she now keeps seeing her father in shadows. A second flatline experience results in his explanation that his PTSD was the trigger, not herself.

The fifth, Steckle, refrains from flatlining. He says he doesn’t want to be chased by his childhood babysitter, waving a sandwich at him.

The theme is, mostly, be good or you’ll hate your afterlife. Given the dearth of evidence for an afterlife, though, the story lacks any staying power, which is to say that having a discussion of the lessons of the movie is far-fetched. A modern morality tale is a logical sequence of steps, “If you do that then this will happen to you!” But in the afterlife? While the religious zealot may decry this assertion, no one really knows if there is an afterlife – much less what occurs there.

Sure, acting in an honest, respectful manner is a good thing – but this story, at least of the three men, does nothing to honestly affirm that theme.

And Manus’ lesson, whatever it may be, is a discordant note in the chorus. She did nothing wrong, but she imagines she did, whether consciously or unconsciously. If you consider Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, or extended novel if you prefer (and not the Peter Jackson movies, and I’ll thank you not to remind me of them when it comes to fidelity and understanding), every major character is confronted with the question of temptation; their immediate and long-term fates are an exploration of how reactions to temptation ultimately conclude.

Not so here. This discordance lessens the impact of an already dubious premise.

It’s too bad. The film is a professional production otherwise, enjoyable – but ultimately a puff piece working off a dubious premise.

The change in shipping patterns caused by the blockage of the Suez Canal led me to VesselFinder:

Too bad I don’t have a before and after for the southern regions of Africa.

And here’s the Suez Canal closeup:

That isolated yellow blob in the middle is the Ever Given. Going in even closer shows the ship blocking the canal.

And I presume the rest of the ships in the Canal are tugboats or other vessels dedicated to getting the Ever Given out of this mess.

I’ve not known until now. Lyle Denniston, who has been covering SCOTUS for nearly 60 years, explains:

Among the circle of people outside the Supreme Court but closest to it – the lawyers who practice there and the professors who study it – there is much talk and a lot of criticism these days of the problem of what they call the “shadow docket.” That is the Court’s choice, increasing in frequency and in legal consequences, of deciding important controversies without deep study, and without full explanation and sometimes none at all.

Unlike regular rulings, the kind that emerge after thorough vetting and prolonged deliberations, the pronouncements the Court is making more often on that docket are the products of a quickie, once-over-lightly examination that leaves lower courts, attorneys and the American public guessing about what they mean.

Sometimes, of course, the Court is required to act quickly, perhaps in emergencies, but those occasions ought to be rare, and – even when they happen – ought to be clear as to how the Court acted and why. The opaque process of the “shadow docket,” however, is a phenomenon that the Court as a whole does not concede is a problem, even though individual Justices have at times joined in the criticism. There seems to be little prospect now of a change.

So is this a deliberate choice by Chief Justice Roberts as a way to escape scrutiny by Court watchers? Or just a case of being overwhelmed and trying to cover more ground with less effort?

This was particularly disturbing, as it implies who is filing affects the outcome of deliberations, such as they are:

When the Trump Administration came into office, taking bold new legal initiatives, many of which ran into roadblocks in lower courts, government lawyers discovered the value of the “shadow docket.” They soon found that an increasingly conservative majority on the Supreme Court was sympathetic to putting those lower court orders on hold. That meant, of course, that a contested policy could go into effect, with at least implied support from the highest tribunal. That administration far exceeded what any other administration had done with these maneuvers, making routine use of what previously had been unusual.

That Trump Administration lawyers took advantage of the conservative majority’s temperament to overcome lower court rulings, while Biden Administration lawyers probably cannot, and might not even try, smacks of favoritism deeply unworthy of the Court.

The grounding of the Ever Given in the Suez Canal may be an ongoing mess, but I did like this photo from Egypt Today Magazine. It’s nicely composed.

From Not Totally Rad, a medical imaging blog:

Waking Up is Hard to Do
If these 5 Minnesota nurse-anesthetists can pass gas as well as they can sing, I want my next surgery in their hospital.

Remember way back when, when Albert Einstein had predicted that light could be bent by sufficiently massive objects, and observed in conditions such as … a solar eclipse? And a solar eclipse was scheduled to occur a century ago?

Dr. Tony Phillips has the story on Spaceweather.com:

On May 29, 1919, the Moon slid in front of the sun and forever altered our understanding of spacetime. It was “Einstein’s Eclipse.” Using the newly-developed theory of relativity, the young German physicist predicted that the sun’s gravity should bend starlight–an effect which could be seen only during a total eclipse. Some of the greatest astronomers of the age rushed to check his prediction.

And the cherry on top:

More than 100 years later, Petr Horálek (ESO Photo Ambassador, Institute of Physics in Opava) and Miloslav Druckmüller (Brno University of Technology) have just released a stunning restoration of the photo that proved Einstein right:

The stars that were in the position predicted by relativity are down in the lower right, although frankly I have no idea which ones – I suppose any of them prove the point, assuming they have deviated from the position predicted by previous theories by the expected amount.

But I just like the pic. That prominence on the upper right is fantastic.

Or at least I hope that’s what lead to this:

A 10,000-kilometre-long fibre-optic cable owned by Google that is at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean can be used to detect deep-sea seismic activity and ocean waves.

Zhongwen Zhan at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, and his colleagues, including researchers at Google, used traffic data from one of the tech giant’s optical fibres to measure changes in pressure and strain in the cable. Using this data, they could detect earthquakes and ocean waves called swells generated by storms.

Over a nine-month period, the team recorded around 30 ocean storm swell events and around 20 earthquakes over magnitude 5 – strong enough to damage buildings – including the magnitude 7.4 earthquake event near Oaxaca, Mexico, in June 2020. The team had wanted to measure a tsunami, but none occurred during the monitoring. [“Google uses underwater fibre-optic cable to detect earthquakes,” Priti Parikh, NewScientist (6 March 2021)]

This is one of those unplanned science research efforts that I generally find delightful. I can imagine the phone call: Hey! We just realized something really cool …

But I seem to have an impediment named Mayhem.

I had to make do with lunch.

Bolero, but now not how I’ve ever heard it before….

For those of us not up on obscure Nazi-related insults, Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels was Nazi Germany’s #2 man, and in charge of the Propaganda Ministry, which is communications used in a deceitful manner.

Today, which I will cling to as I haven’t yet gone to bed, I learned of a recent tweet by Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), a first-term member of the House of Representatives. CNN/Politics delivers the text of it:

Rep. Madison Cawthorn, a North Carolina Republican who has a history of egregious false claims, posted another one Sunday on Twitter.

Cawthorn was criticizing a new $86.9 million federal contract to house some migrant families in hotel rooms as they await legal proceedings to remove them from the US. (Other migrant families are being swiftly expelled without a court process.)

“The Biden Admin just dropped $86 Million dollars to get hotel rooms for ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS yet we have zero dollars going to our homeless veterans who are at a high risk of suicide. UNACCEPTABLE. UNAMERICAN,” Cawthorn wrote.

The CNN report goes on to fact check Cawthorn’s claim (a resounding false), a counterclaim that the tweet was actually about the single contract and not about the overall Federal response (“huh?”), etc.

But I’m considering how this fits into the overall pattern of conservative governance – or lack thereof. Among many sources, a while back the Washington Examiner reported:

Cawthorn has received criticism among fellow conservatives and liberals alike, who feel he is more focused on media appearances than the business of legislating.

Cawthorn had emailed fellow Republicans on Jan. 19, “I have built my staff around comms rather than legislation,” Time reported Jan. 27.

Cawthorn felt the quote was not properly contextualized but acknowledged, “That is what we said.”

“The problem is, being in the minority, I see little use in devoting the overwhelming majority of my staff to the legislative side, whereas I think it is much more beneficial to be serving the constituents in my district and helping them with their casework,” he said. “I have more staff in the district than most people would have in D.C.”

It sounds reasonable, but I have to wonder. The GOP, to my eye, has been exhibiting a decay of skill in governance even as it has won – and lost – control over the elective branches of government since the turn of the century. Today, the Democrats’ lock on the legislative branch is paper-thin; the removal of a single Democratic Senator would give the Senate back to the Republicans, if that Senator came from a state with a Republican governor and lacked a law calling for a Senator to be replaced by a member of their own party.

But the incompetence exhibited by the Republicans 2001-2007 and 2017-2019 in exercising fiscal discipline during the first period, or even competently writing legislation during the second, is in keeping with a party that is continuing to lean authoritarian.

Cawthorn’s putative reasoning may seem logical, but when he or his staff issue a tweet which is, at best, highly deceptive and seeded with concepts intended to stir up emotions – and if favoring illegal aliens over homeless vets doesn’t stir your emotions, you’re not paying attention – followed by a ridiculous defense, it’s clear that he’s not allocating resources on the basis of honest legislating, even within the framework of getting control of the House back.

This really seems to be about keeping a base stirred up and emotional.

And that, in turn, is not unusual for most political parties – think of the fights over the Kavanaugh and Barrett nominations to SCOTUS and some of the inflammatory rhetoric from the Democrats and beyond them on the far-left. But I find it disturbing that the cited incompetence, in combination with Members of Congress who seem to be dedicated to keeping the base stirred up, such as Senator Johnson (R-WI), Senator Lee (R-UT), Rep Cawthorn, Rep Boebert (R-CO), and Rep Greene (R-GA), suggests that good governance is no longer a priority for the Republicans, even if a number of leading GOP officials expressed apprehension concerning the latter two prior to their election.

Instead of developing skills in governance, even while in the minority, by, say, learning to compromise and working across the aisle, these members seem to be little more than weapons, propaganda vehicles.

This would be congruent with, but not dispositive of, an authoritarian governmental form in which all policy and directive comes from a small coterie at the top of the hierarchy, and everyone else is to shut up and do what they’re told. Arguments can be made that both sides do this, but Democratic activity seems to be far more collaborative and utilizes the skills and ideas of many members.

In contrast, the failed replacement for the ACA was reported to have been written by a handful of Republican senators who even failed to ask their Republican colleagues for assistance, much less the opposition. Ditto the 2017 Tax Reform bill, which passed and did not accomplish its goals. Indeed, the relative inactivity of the Senate when it was run by Senator McConnell (R-KY), outside of the judiciary confirmation work, reportedly generated complaints from his fellow GOP Senators, and suggests someone who is genuinely afraid of trying to pass legislation.

But, in hindsight, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. The toxic team politics tenet that the Republicans have pursued for so long that it’s become part of a political aphorism – Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall into line – would, to my mind, lead to a hierarchical model of governance. Add in Goldwater’s warning concerning religious zealot pastors who see compromise and adversaries as evil, and far-right fringers who have gotten a taste of power and like it, and it turns towards being a deadly poison in a country in which power should be transferred violence-free, rights protected, and wealth fairly distributed – not concentrated disastrously at the top of the food chain.

But where will this lead? I don’t know. I’d like to believe that the American electorate is getting better and better at the entire Web communications thing, that they’ll look at the hijinks of those listed above and their allies and begin to see the sleight of hand.

But I don’t know. I just don’t know. This not-shooting warfare reminds me of Professor Turchin’s theory concerning agrarian demographics, and not in a good way. The January 6th Insurrection could be interpreted as a specimen of the elite internecine  warfare Turchin observes during the disintegrative phase of a secular cycle, as numerous members of Congress were reportedly in danger, regardless of what Senator Johnson has claimed.

Yeah, we’re no longer agrarian – but I don’t think human impulses towards power differ all that much between agrarian and non-agrarian societies.

If you find this believable …

After weeks of near-total diplomatic silence from North Korea following the inauguration of U.S. President Joe Biden, the Hermit Kingdom’s reclusive head of state unexpectedly appeared in this well-to-do Florida town in a whimsical, romantic flourish.

Surprised residents watched as Kim Jong-Un stood just outside former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, clad in a brown trench coat, holding a large boombox radio with a tape deck over his head, loudly blasting Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.”

… then it’s time to get your sarcasm detector overhauled.

But if it made you laugh, then you may want to chuck a bit of change at Duffel Blog.

“I didn’t know what to make of it,” said longtime resident Monecia Taylor, who saw the ruthless tyrant while on her morning walk. “I wondered what could be making such a ruckus so early in the morning. I almost called the police, but then realized who it was. It was really sweet.”

When passersby asked the murderous family cult leader what he hoped to accomplish, he was silent at first. But after some prodding, he finally opened up.

“We had something special,” said the Butcher of Pyongyang. “I refuse to believe that when Trump said ‘We fell in love,’ that he didn’t mean it.”

Ooops!

In reference to the concerns of Andrew Sullivan regarding the ARP, a reader writes:

Where were these whiners when the GQP sucked the same trillions out of the economy by giving massive tax breaks to the rich, over and over? I lost all my respect of Sullivan long time ago. His 15 minutes are so over.

I must point out that, in the years of reading Sullivan, he’s never expressed any sympathy or kinship with the GOP – not of today, not of the GOP who took us into two wars twenty years ago. None. He has expressed dislike both intellectually and viscerally.

Did he support those wars? Yes – right up until the CIA torture sessions came up. Then he

1. Changed his opinion;
2. Expressed his shame, as he felt he shared responsibility for those shameful torture sessions;
3. Apologized;
4. Changed his advocacy;
5. And, most extraordinarily, self-analyzed in an effort to discover how he had come to a wrong decision in the first place.

That is not something you see often, if at all, in conservative or liberal circles.

In so far as financial matters go, he’s been less interested in those details, at least in what I’ve read. Sullivan is an independent, philosophical conservative who has embraced the ACA, who led the fight for gay marriage, and has been more interested in the philosophy and sociology of political matters on both the left and the right, than budgetary.

Will he be wrong on some matters and right on others? Sure. That’s the nature of the game. But I think I can count on him being honest about being wrong, I can count on him ignoring the rules of being liberal or conservative, much to the frustration of the woke and the far-right, and he has the added benefit of being a good writer.

I sorely wish he wasn’t migrating towards podcasting. Podcasts are far too ephemeral, and I hate digging through accents, since most accents elude me.