Monthly Archives: May 2021

We don’t usually get petunias, but here’s a few.

Nadia Gill comments on Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao, director of Nomadland, a movie about American nomads – a subculture with which Zhao was unfamiliar. First, setup:

Zhao’s success has come at a time when critics are questioning the legitimacy of filmmakers telling stories as community outsiders. Last year, the filmmaker Lulu Wang publicly criticized Ron Howard’s decision to direct a film about the Chinese pianist Lang Lang. “As a classically-trained pianist born in China, I believe it’s impossible to tell Lang Lang’s story without an intimate understanding of Chinese culture and the impact of the Cultural Revolution on artists and intellectuals and the effects of Western imperialism,” Wang tweeted. [Persuasion]

Which is understandable, especially for oppressed minorities, But Gill gets to the heart of the matter:

Zhao and her trio of films about the American West teach us that identity alone cannot predict who is able to see and share the truth. Some abilities are hidden from plain view: They are of the heart and the mind. If we wish to create a rich environment for storytelling that enhances our understanding of communities that are not our own, we would be wise to care more about the filmmaker’s character than their identity.

Being a member of a culture does not necessarily bring perception to the observation, to the story; sometimes, the cultural myths serve the interests of the elite all too well in obscuring important truths. For example, my understanding is that the Catholic hierarchy has long hosted, and shielded, pedophiles and the like; it’s not a new phenomenon. But revelations to the general Catholic public of same is relatively new, which means the myths of the holiness of the Catholic hierarchy obscured for decades or even centuries, rather than revealed, the truth of Catholic culture. A Catholic film maker from fifty or one hundred years ago might have made a film in ignorance of that very real problem.

I understand Lulu Wang’s concerns, but there can be tremendous value in the viewpoint of the outsider, who may see that which the member of the culture has been trained to not see.  And I think Zhao is getting at that with this:

In an interview last year, Zhao explained her philosophy: “I find that sometimes when I go into a community that’s not my own, or a community that has a lot of issues attached to it, I have to resist wanting to say something about how I think they could be better, or how I think the government has wronged them.”

And perhaps not erasing those myths from the story is part of it.

Sequelae:

a morbid condition following or occurring as a consequence of another condition or event. [The Free Dictionary]

Noted in “Long Covid: How Bungle Reporting on a Thorny Topic,” zeynep, Insight:

Let me start by saying that I do not at all dismiss the threat of long COVID—lingering illness months after the initial acute phase ends. Such post-viral sequelae have been observed for many other pathogens, and it’s well-documented that there is a cluster of debilitating conditions we call myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) in a large number of sufferers who deserve―above all—respect, attention and resources.

And what is it? A meteorological tsunami. Tsunamis are commonly driven by earthquakes as underwater mountains of earth collapse, bestirring the ocean into awesome destruction by flooding of land. A Meteotsunami can cause the same, but is driven by meteorological phenomenon, such as storm fronts.

And the results can be far more subtle:

Waiting for his first nibble of the morning, [Marvin] Katz remembers feeling the boat lightly rock. Then he looked toward shore and saw the breakwater had nearly been wiped clean: Some people were clinging to the rocks, others were floundering in the mouth of the harbor amid an entanglement of fishing rods and bait boxes.

“It just happened so fast. The water rose in seconds,” Katz, an 87-year-old Wilmette resident, recalled nearly 65 years later. “It was like an elevator was pushing it up. We looked up and realized all these people were in the water drowning and there was no one to help.”

Katz steered the powerboat alongside a 50-year-old man struggling to stay afloat and pulled him aboard. In the time it took to rescue him, the frenzied cries for help quieted and no one was left above water.

In a matter of minutes, an 8- to 10-foot “freak wave” spanning from north suburban Wilmette Harbor to North Avenue Beach in Chicago had submerged the lakefront, killing eight people. [Chicago Tribune]

In a phrase, rip currents had swallowed them up and killed them. More here.

Here’s the Virginia bluebells, off to their roughly two week lifecycle.

An epithet is “a characterizing word or phrase firmly associated with a person or thing and often used in place of an actual name, title, or the like,” and I had to love Jennifer Rubin’s implicit proposal for a new epithet:

Modus vivendi:

1. manner of living; way of life; lifestyle.
2. a temporary arrangement between persons or parties pending a settlement of matters in debate. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in “The latest violence between Israel and Palestinians will end when both sides can declare victory. But it will be no more than a truce,” Tim Lister, CNN/World:

In some ways this suits both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas. Through confrontation they reinforce their respective bases and hollow out voices of moderation. Hamas can claim it is the true representative of Palestinians — just as the aging President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, postpones elections. Were negotiations — promoted by the international community — to restart, Hamas would be the loser as its modus vivendi is armed resistance to the Jewish state.

In the wake of the news of the failure to prevent the sale of a chain of newspapers of good repute, including the Baltimore Sun and the Orlando Sentinel, to a hedge fund of ill-repute, Alden Global Capital, Karl Bode has an observation:

we're slowly replacing a functional press with PR spam, hedge fund dudebros, trolling substack opinion columnists, foreign and domestic disinformation, brand-slathered teen influencers, and hugely consolidated dumpster fires like Sinclair Broadcasting https://t.co/oKyDCCNn2K

— Karl Bode (@KarlBode) May 21, 2021

I’m a little fascinated by the swipe at Substack, an entity that has become a haven for dissident thinkers, such as Andrew Sullivan, who (at least claimed) that expressing doubts about the woke community’s intellectual grounding resulted in his having to leave New York Magazine and what passes for the conventional journalistic/intellectual community, which he claimed had become infected with an illiberal intolerance based in the woke community. Bode’s is the sort of ad hominem swipe that greatly reduces the credibility of those who use it; his characterization of it as a home for opinion writers, while perhaps a bit limited, validates it, as opinion, informed and reasoned, is what the liberal intellectual world runs on.

But his larger point is, I think, something to legitimately worry about. For me, it’s the difficult-to-remedy problem of substituting the private sector metric of financial success for an organic measure of success in the free press sector, best characterized as acknowledgments of journalistic excellence. After all, money is easy to count; awarding Pulitzer Prizes, not so much; the common citizen is a poor judge of journalistic excellence, given the popularity of the inferior Fox News. Thus, financial success becomes a pathological and existential metric of success.

Regardless, the larger question of whether Bode (and Tumulty at WaPo) are right to bemoan a free press in deep trouble, or are merely concerned about their world changing out underneath them, is worthy of meditation. While the final answer will only come from post-change measurements, subjective or objective, the motivations for predicting and heading off changes deleterious to the benefits of the free press to society are obvious. While I distrust Bode’s personal judgment on the matter, the matter itself remains important, even critical, and I hope individuals and entities capable of the feat will step forward and offer Alden the opportunity to offload the entities they’ve just acquired before they can gut them.

Graham Lawton of NewScientist (8 May 2021, paywall) says ecocide is a word with a long history, but it’s a new one on me. Regardless, ecocide reminds me of attempts by environmental activists to find ways to incorporate Nature into the legal system, such as with chimps and with lakes (I have a post somewhere about regarding lakes as persons but cannot find it). Lawton gives us some context:

A widely reported research paper set out to discover how much of Earth’s land is ecologically intact, meaning that its ecosystem remains in a pristine, pre-industrial state. The answer: just 3 per cent. To frame it differently, in the past 500 years, humans have degraded 97 per cent of the terrestrial biosphere.

There is, I think, only one word for such levels of destruction: ecocide. Like genocide, it isn’t a word to be thrown around casually. But what else does justice to that degree of destruction?

Speaking of justice, that is exactly what some activists would like ecocide to lead to. Their long-standing goal is to have ecocide recognised in international law alongside crimes like genocide.

Those who bring destruction on nature could find themselves at the International Criminal Court (ICC) next to the perpetrators of the most heinous crimes against humanity. This idea has long been on the fringes of environmental activism, but it now has a genuine chance of being written into the statute books.

Like laws for crimes against peace, an ecocide law would trace its roots to wartime atrocities, in this case the annihilation of forests in South-East Asia, first by the UK’s Royal Air Force during the guerrilla war known as the Malayan Emergency and later by the US Air Force in the Vietnam war. In 1970, the destruction inspired Arthur Galston, a plant biologist at Yale University whose PhD research had led to the development of agent orange, to coin the word “ecocide”.

And you have to have a law before you can have a crime.

It’s an interesting concept, and gives rise to all sorts of questions, from whether the Hoover Dam and its brethren are considered, or will be considered, sites of mass ecocide, to whether or not a crop such as Afghani poppies, torched by adversaries, qualifies as ecocide. What of accidental ecocide? Is it excused, or is the law enforced as a way to make accidents so expensive that planners would be forced to take the law into account?

I think Lawton is a little ahead of himself here:

The 2002 treaty that created the ICC [International Criminal Court] originally included an ecocide law, but it was scaled back after objections from the UK and US (wilful environmental destruction in wartime is a crime, but nobody has been prosecuted for it).

But campaigners stuck to the task and criminalisation has slowly gathered support. Last year saw a significant breakthrough when two of the ICC’s member states, Vanuatu and the Maldives, asked the court to “seriously consider” criminalising ecocide. President Emmanuel Macron of France has backed their request and the government of Belgium has also indicated support.

The left wing, beyond the left of most Democrats, would back such an international law. The mainline Democrats would not.

And the Republicans’ eyes would positively bug out at the thought of being subject to such a law. They have a bad enough time tolerating the EPA as it is, even if one of their own, President Nixon, was its father.

And Lawton knows the road is long and perhaps too rough:

Last month, I hosted a New Scientist event called A Rescue Plan for Nature. We invited a distinguished panel to answer questions submitted by the audience. One was on whether ecocide should be a crime.

I expected a resounding yes, but didn’t get one. Partha Dasgupta, an economist at the University of Cambridge, said: “It’s something we could aspire to in the future but it’s far too early.” Even though there is a strong philosophical argument in favour, he said, the practical danger is that we get bogged down in legal definitions and end up achieving nothing.

I have great respect for Dasgupta and his answer gives me pause. Making ecocide a crime has enormous instinctive appeal. But as a real-world measure, would it do anything? Pursuing alleged war criminals though the ICC has proved time-consuming and difficult enough. When it comes to ecocide, who would be in the dock?

I wonder how many 20-somethings, here and abroad, are looking at this subject as a possible career.

Here’s the link to the paper Lawton cites.

Extirpate:

to remove or destroy something completely [Cambridge Dictionary]

Noted in “Where Might We Find Ecologically Intact Communities?” Andrew J. Plumptre, et al, frontiers in Forests and Global Change:

Figure 4. Changes in percentage of ecoregions in biomes selecting first areas of HF ≤ 4; then removing areas where species have been extirpated and finally removing areas where species are at low density. Results are presented for ecoregions with minimum polygon of 10,000 km2.

According to my browser, there were at least fifty uses of various forms of the word extirpate.

Karen Tumulty of WaPo finds hope in the news that 35 House Republicans voted for the bipartisan commission on the January 6th Capitol insurrection, despite the opposition of Rep Kevin McCarthy and the rest of what we so laughingly call the House GOP leadership:

Political analysts, including esteemed handicapper Charlie Cook, have noted that while there are few signs that Trump’s base has or will turn on him, there is some evidence that their fervor for him no longer burns as hot as it once did.

In a recent column for National Journal, Cook cited a raft of previously unreleased polling data conducted by Hart Research for NBC News and the Wall Street Journal. It showed, among other things, that the share of Trump loyalists who said they had “very positive” feelings about him had declined from the 83-to-94-percent range during his presidency down to 75 percent in an April survey. More and more of them described their feelings about Trump as “somewhat positive” or even “neutral.” …

Republicans in what’s left of the party’s battered establishment wing have been having quiet conversations among themselves about the need to help protect these courageous GOP lawmakers from Trump’s wrath by raising money for them and possibly by bringing in firepower from super PACs.

I think the wildcard that Tumulty is ignoring is the influence of the religious leaders on their flocks. When Trump unexpectedly won in 2016, the clerics and “prophets” and all the other grifters who had put a bet on Trump found the skies had opened and it rained all over them – wealth, power, and prestige. They’ll do their damndest – word play intended – to cling to all those things, as will certain members of their flocks who, too, discovered those things in their devotion to Trump.

That includes such strategies as pushing out the rational and semi-rational Republicans, such as Cheney, Sanford, and anyone who voted for impeachment or the bipartisan commission. An irrational base, easily led and milked, is their goal. They won’t be easily discouraged, because they’ve had their taste of all the foul honey.

And the devotion of the base has been astounding. The only real question is whether Trump is caught out doing something truly horrific, such as being on the edge of bankruptcy. Not being worth billions would be a real turnoff for the prosperity church creatures. Certain types of sexual deviancy might also cause it.

But if Trump dies, someone else will pick up the reins. In fact, there’ll be a good fight over them.

From The Daily Beast:

The world of UFO conspiracy theorists has been torn apart by dueling lawsuits, pitting a prominent UFO influencer against a conspiracy-minded streaming video company valued at more than $200 million over who has the right to discuss their experiences with a benevolent species of blue alien.

The battle taking place in a federal courthouse in Colorado centers on Corey Goode, a UFO promoter and self-proclaimed deep-space traveler who consorts with benevolent aliens, and his former employer, Gaia, a publicly traded streaming platform whose videos blend yoga instruction with stories about “deep state” villains and benevolent aliens.

After leaving his Gaia show in 2018, Goode engaged in a long-running feud with the company. In March 2020, Goode sued Gaia, alleging that the company had engaged in an elaborate conspiracy against him. On Monday, Gaia filed a countersuit, accusing Goode of defamation and concocting various schemes to sabotage the company.

Attorneys for Goode and Gaia declined to comment.

Much of the lawsuit centers on who has the right to talk about a bird-like species of alien called “Blue Avians,” as well as a covert space agency that are, in Goode’s telling, both supposed to be real things.

I suppose that everyone has their sensitivities. Mine, oddly enough, isn’t that this feud exists. It’s that the company involved, Gaia – which I can only hope isn’t associated with Dr. Lovelock of the Gaia Hypothesis fame – is worth over $200 million.

Are you kidding me?

Or are these people who are the consumers of this trash simply enjoying a good story and know it’s all silly?

I suppose we could compare it to Star Trek. It actually halfway makes sense then.

It must be that time of the year, when the little green guys comes spilling out of their flying saucers, looking to renew their supply of … sigh … Hamm’s beer. How do I know? The Onion waved a flag:

Details have begun to leak about an upcoming Pentagon report declassifying government intelligence about unidentified flying objects, which must be released in accordance with a provision of the coronavirus spending bill President Trump signed into law in December 2020. The Onion provides some of the most intriguing details from the upcoming report on UFOs. …

• Confirmation of existence of Jon Hamm and other Hamm-like beings.

But that’s not my favorite consequence. Here it is:

• List of cities government has authorized to offer as sacrifices to aggressive extraterrestrials.

Just like I said earlier today. Sort of.

Enjoy.

Post storm.

I couldn’t help but laugh at this remark:

I first met Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno, head of the Vatican Observatory and sometimes called “the pope’s astronomer,” after an event on science fiction and theology we did at the Sheen Center for Thought & Culture.

We ended up talking a lot about aliens. He agreed with me that the Catholic intellectual tradition would have absolutely zero problem with the idea of intelligent life — that is, substances of a rational nature (the classic definition of a “person” in my field) — on other planets.

But when asked in a later, more in-depth interview on these topics if he would be willing to baptize an alien, he said, “Only if she asked.” [Religion News Service]

And, quite seriously, what happens if they whip out a frazzlesnoozle and offer to induct you into their religion?

A polite No, thank you! is assumed.

I was a little perplexed by this remark, though:

I’ve heard lots of folks over the years speculate on what the reality of nonhuman persons on other plants would mean for religious belief — implying that it would be some kind of challenge or problem. But I agree with Ezra Klein, who argued in a recent New York Times column that the challenge is actually more profound for his own secular worldview, which positions humanity as a kind of cosmic accident in an empty cosmos.

If Mr. Klein’s “secular worldview” suggests that humanity is the only intelligent life – or, worse, just life – in the Universe, then it’s not secular.

It’s religious.

Look: A secular, or better yet agnostic, world-view has at its heart an acknowledgement of a lack of knowledge. Based on our limited knowledge of the requirements of life, and the frequency with which those requirements are satisfied in the cosmos, any statement as to whether we’re unique or terribly common in this Universe is, in either case, a statement of faith, not evidence. And faith, when studying reality, should be meticulously minimized, although I doubt it can be entirely omitted. For example, the idea that reality can be understood to any substantial degree is, in itself, a statement of faith.

So, for me, the existence of aliens is a speculative statistical claim, not a claim of certainty, but rather that of hope – because aliens would be cool right up until we’re all running for our lives – and to think that we’re unique in the category of intelligent creatures in the Universe is an unpleasant, even tragic thought. I’d like to think there are aliens, but, until we catch one of these UFOs and open them up and prove they’re occupied by aliens rather than Russians, I also openly acknowledge that it’s merely a hope of mine.

But Klein’s intellectual world-view, if it has not been misstated, is profoundly broken.

For those wondering as to the lure of lots of cash when it comes to vaccination, here’s the first of the Ohio results:

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s $5 million lottery to encourage vaccinations appears to be an early win.

State health officials said Monday that more than 25,400 Covid-19 vaccine shots were administered Friday, two days after the program was announced, making it the highest vaccination day in three weeks.

Maybe more telling were the people who got vaccinated. Vaccinations for residents ages 30 to 74 spiked by 6 percent after weeks of steady decline.

“Not only have we achieved our goal of increasing public awareness and interest, but we have slowed what was a consistent decline, and in certain age groups we’re seeing an increase again,” state Health Director Stephanie McCloud said. “This is doing exactly what we intended it to do.” [NBC News]

It’ll be interesting to see more nuanced analysis, and perhaps surveys to see how many people were vaccinated but told their friends that they had not.

Update: New York and Maryland are now using this strategy as well.

What goes up must come down? All bubbles eventually implode?

From Buy Bitcoin Worldwide

Not always, but it appears some crypto investors may share my mind on this matter: cryptocurrencies may not be inherently stable. Other currencies are following suit:

Bitcoin, the most popular and valuable token, fell by more than 20 percent in early morning trading before recovering some of its losses. It sank below price levels not seen since January. Many other top tokens followed suit. Dogecoin investors, who had enjoyed astronomical growth this year, seeing their holdings skyrocket by roughly 10,000 percent, were hit especially hard. The meme-inspired cryptocurrency tumbled by more than 30 percent. [WaPo]

And this must have been particularly alarming for folks with big stakes:

Coinbase, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, reported service disruptions Wednesday morning. An error screen displayed when Web users traveled to the homepage. Customers reported that they were unable to log in, see their balances or trade their tokens, the company said.

Practicalities aside, the real question remains whether or not cryptocurrencies deliver a substantial advantage to its users and the world economy, while remaining relatively isolated from governments and other institutions hostile to its mission. So far, there’s nothing that impresses me – cryptocurrencies appears to blow in the wind, value-wise, while consuming vast amounts of resources. The latter may not be a permanent problem as the various currencies can pursue “proof of stake” mining strategies which should reduce resource consumption, but the former?

And this has been gnawing at me all day:

A couple of days ago I was discussing the collapse of political morality occurs when a political party would rather defeat the legitimate aims & responsibilities of governing rather than give a rival party a victory. Perhaps it’s petty, or perhaps Senator McConnell is correct in suggesting that a victory for the Democrats endangers the Republicans, but there it is.

And here we have an example. The Des Moines Register wrote an editorial to Senator Grassley (R-IA), imploring him to support the Democratic plan for expanded funding for the Internal Revenue Service:

In fact, leaders like Sen. Chuck Grassley, who say they champion rooting out fraud and abuse, should be leading the charge to ensure tax scofflaws are pursued.

Iowa’s senior senator attended an April Senate Finance Committee hearing with testimony from IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig.

He certainly heard Rettig estimate the federal treasury is losing approximately $1 trillion in unpaid taxes each year, more than the annual defense budget. He certainly heard Rettig say that additional mandatory, predictable funding from Congress would “absolutely” help the agency plan, hire workers and catch tax cheats.

Grassley understands a starved agency cannot do its job, whether that job is guarding against fraud on a child tax credit crafted by Democrats or implementing tax cuts crafted by Republicans.

Estimates that an increase in funding of $80 billion would lead to collection of more than $700 billion – a magnitude profit on investment, for those prone to the monetary approach to evaluation.

And, I might add, an IRS unable to conduct appropriate audits, answer questions, or even pick up the phone – the Register estimates the IRS only answers 25% of the calls it receives, and whether those are satisfactory transitions is not at all clear –  has more than a monetary impact. Discontent is a powerful force in electoral politics, and while underfunding the IRS may not be visible, or meet with knee-jerk approval, the suspicions that the big corporations are underpaying their obligations, or the wealthy are getting away with ignoring there obligations, leads to an unhappy electorate.

So the Register’s editorial is important.

And Senator Grassley’s response? After citing what are basically Band-Aid responses and irrelevancies, such as claiming that Congress has given the IRS more funding than it requested recently – a response lacking context, such as what happened before 2020, when Trump tried to strangle the IRS – he turns his response into a political attack:

The Biden administration claims more money for enforcement would allow the IRS to collect at least $700 billion. Outside experts have disputed this rosy revenue scenario. Even if this pipe dream is realized, the extra revenue is dwarfed by the Democrats’ $6 trillion spending agenda. And businesses of all sizes would incur new and burdensome compliance costs and reporting requirements along the way. Instead of promising a chicken in every pot, Biden’s plan promises an auditor at every kitchen table.

The IRS also has a trust deficit. During the Obama administration, the IRS was weaponized to target conservative political organizations, and wasted millions in taxpayer dollars on elaborate conferences, and bonuses for IRS employees who failed to pay their own taxes. The IRS also burned through tens of millions of dollars on software that never got off the ground. Americans are right to be wary about further investment in the IRS without significant controls.

It’s hard to know where to begin. This is definitely a scare-mongering response, between kitchen auditors and the fictitious weaponization of the IRS during the Obama Administration. Even if these are true, and at least some of his reasoning relies on studies from Forbes, a reliable right-wing, tax-skeptical media source, increased funding has nothing to do with abuse of the function of the IRS.

The bottom line: An inefficient, underfunded IRS becomes a very leaky boat for the funds it’s supposed to collect and account; those leaks by turns scare and infuriate us, the passengers; and all of this leads to, counter-intuitively, a discontented populace in which it appears the elite, fixated as much of it is on its wealth & position, has passed on fulfilling its responsibilities.

And this isn’t hard stuff to figure out. Grassley should, and probably does, know all this. But he’s in a Party devoted religiously to lower taxes and paranoia of the government. Yes, we could have a happier populace. But Grassley can’t let that happen. It goes against his political/religious tenets.

Iris? Tulip? This is from last week. Just to prove the garden is still alive.

When you find your own side of the political spectrum harbors extremists and others who are digging up the very foundations of government, well, if you can’t admit to it, this is what Erick Erickson speaks, he claims on the air:

The Democrats have internalized orange man bad. The Democrats fundamentally believe that Donald Trump is the villain. They really believe people like Jay Rosen, the well-respected New York University journalism professor who admitted he believes that the United States is on the verge of turning into a white Christian nationalist state. It’s bet [sic] poop crazy nonsense, but the Democrats have internalized it.

Let’s see: Charlottesville, Covid-19 response (it was all magical thinking), NATO, 2017 “tax reform”, climate change, there’s probably a dozen more examples of Trump doing nothing more than playing to the biases of his base rather than doing what’s best for the nation. Orange man bad? Incompetent, unjustifiably boastful, mendacious, oh so many other adjectives, or bad? Pick it, Erickson.

The same people who are scared of a virus and can’t take their mask off are, of course, emotionally and mentally scarred by the events of January 6th and have internalized the worst possible scenario. They have no reason to want to know or understand Donald Trump’s voters. They think they’re all racist. They have internalized that it’s a bunch of white people and white people are bad, therefore, Donald Trump’s supporters are all bad and need to destroy them. They are overplaying their hand on this.

Look at that first sentence and then start reciting the Holy Litany: Smallpox, TB, polio, measles, mumps, whooping cough. Hell, let’s add Long Covid, Just To Freak Erickson Out. All of these are caused by pathogens^[1], and Erickson trying to portray them the independents and Democrats as weak-minded over a serious health problem that not only is directly threatening to our personal health, but to the stability of our societal health system, marks this passage as desperately broken and ineffective – unless you’re emotionally inclined to believe his fallacious first point. This is not known as leading; this is known as playing to the audience, and it’s not an honest thing to do when it comes to the important subject of governance.

I think this generates backlash. I do think when the New York attorney general, the Manhattan district attorney, and a Georgia district attorney, all pile on Donald Trump, it begins to look like a vendetta, not a legitimate prosecution. It looks like they’re trying to punish Donald Trump for existing and that draws a backlash from the American public, who tends to get outraged by this sort of stuff.

This is probably in reaction to this news:

The New York attorney general’s office said Tuesday that it is pursuing a criminal investigation into the Trump Organization, in addition to the ongoing civil probe.

“We have informed the Trump Organization that our investigation into the organization is no longer purely civil in nature. We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity, along with the Manhattan DA. We have no additional comment at this time,” Fabien Levy, a spokesperson for the office, said in a statement. [NBC News]

This may be the terror point for Erickson. If a jury were to find Trump guilty of a criminal offense, well, then his radio audience would be faced with a real dilemma: do we continue to believe Trump is some great leader? Or do they finally recognize him as the greedy man-child that he is to the left?

And, either way, does Erickson retain his audience?

And notice how Erickson dispenses with context. Trump has been to court many times over his refusals to pay for work done, which is easily interpreted as fraud. His charity admitted to fraud. He’s been caught perjuring himself in Court. These are all indicative of a personality which pays little attention to the law and could easily have committed a criminal offense because he thought it profitable – as if refusing to pay people who’ve done work for him isn’t really criminal when it comes right down to it.

Yes, Erickson doesn’t want his audience to think about the central terminal sickness of what constitutes the conservative movement these days. He’ll lose listeners.

So he says, on the radio, crap like the above.

¹ Anyone quibbling over some of these diseases being caused by bacteria may go sit in the corner until they learn to understand overarching points.

Just yesterday I was writing about the GOP approaching purity of corruption, but it turns out there’s still Republicans who protest the antics of their fellows. This would be in Maricopa County, Arizona, where the State Senate has forced a recount, which is being conducted by obscure Trumpist firm Cyber Ninjas, who have drawn vast amounts of criticism for their methods so far.

The Board of Supervisors of Maricopa County, of whom four of the five members are Republicans, are incensed at having their counts, recounts, and verifications questioned by the state Senate, and have written a letter in protest. Money quote:

6. Your “audit” is harming all of us, and we ask you to end it.

Finally, we express our united view that your “audit”, no matter what your intentions were in the beginning, has become a spectacle that is harming all of us. Our state has become a laughingstock. Worse, this “audit” is encouraging our citizens to distrust elections, which weakens our democratic republic.

Your “auditors” began the “audit” unaware that using blue pens on ballots could harm them, and apparently would have distributed blue pens to those conducting the recount of ballots had a reporter not informed them. It has gone downhill from there. Your “audit,” which you once said was intended to increase voters’ confidence in our electoral process, has devolved into a circus.

You are using purple lights and spinning tables. You are hunting for bamboo. These are not things that serious auditors of elections do.

You are photographing ballots contrary to the laws that the Senate helped enact, and you are sending those images to unidentified places and people. You have repeatedly lost control of your twitter account, which has tweeted things that appear to be the rantings of a petulant child—not the serious statements of a serious audit.

The Senate GOP members are reportedly regretting their demand for an audit, but they keep plunging onward, and it’s hard to not see this as corruption at its finest – an audit run by a conspiracy theorist, a Senate that demands to know why the result isn’t what they want, and methods that are ludicrous.

This, BTW, also has all the hallmarks of being run by people who loathe experts. They know what results they want and they’ll find them, by gum. And methods and protocols are for, ummmm, experts! If only those damn judges will stay out of the way!

There’s more in the letter on the three ring circus. Truly, it sounds like that damn curmudgeon next door got themselves elected and is now doing what they prattled on about for all those years.

The only thing missing from this letter from honorable people is a demand that every Senator that still supports the audit to step down in shame.

More than a year ago, Trump ally Representative Devin Nunes (R-CA) sued a parody cow account on Twitter for, ah, being mean to him. Now there’s news that the Barr DoJ got a grand jury subpoena to try to force Twitter to reveal the identity of the person behind the account, and that anonymous person now has a response:

There's nothing remarkable about me. I'm a basic smartass with a Twitter account.

So then why am I being sued by a US congressman? Why would the DOJ ever target me?

Is it the mean tweets and bad memes?

It's not about me or this silly account. It's about silencing all of us. https://t.co/kdU87LVZI2

— Devin Nunes' Alt-Mom (@NunesAlt) May 17, 2021

Silencing is just the surface tension. Autocrats succeed because good people let them, and that happens because of the respect of the distracted or frightened.

Ah, but a good mockery, it’s a rare person who doesn’t like a good mockery. It’s a social signal that there’s something wrong with someone else in the opinion of the mocker. Sometimes it’s purely malicious, of course, but the more easily someone is mocked regarding a serious issue, the more likely there’s something seriously wrong.

And an autocrat, who by definition is wrong, hates the mockery because it not only signals that they should be investigated and booted out of power, but because it pricks the ego inside them: someone doesn’t respect them. And that, in turn, feeds that little impostor syndrome that often also resides there: the suspicion that they are not worthy of respect.

And they hate that.

He’s called the Cerne Abbas Giant.

Source: Wikipedia

There’s some evidence that his phallus was added at a later date.

But I mention this simply to state that I think it’s just a big piece of graffiti. A glorious, big piece of graffiti.

And here’s a WaPo article on him. It. Whatever.

Bubbles, in economic terms, are generally fast inflation of prices for a general category of the market, followed by a deflation that is at least as fast as the inflation, if not faster, caused by the realization that the prices achieved are unsustainable. Over the twenty or so years, I can think of the Internet Bubble at the turn of the century, as investors frantically threw money at firms in hopes of hitting it rich, and the real estate investment bubble which terminated in the Great Recession of 2008.

And now I’m wondering if we’re seeing another one in the cryptocurrency market. This suggests that the market can be overly impacted by certain individuals: