Monthly Archives: May 2021

Antistar:

There could be several stars made of antimatter in our solar system’s neighbourhood. There have been small hints that these strange and unlikely objects, called antistars, could exist, and a search for the gamma rays that they are expected to produce has turned up 14 candidates. [“Antimatter stars may lurk in the solar system’s neighbourhood,” Leah Crane, NewScientist (1 May 2021)]

Professor Richardson’s daily post last night is well worth a full read. But for me, the important part wasn’t so much the sordid details of Republican members’ malfeasance, alleged or admitted, as the sociological backlash of the Gingrichian focus on win, win, win that came to the fore.

Look: The effects that former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA) had, and perhaps still has, on the culture of the GOP is undisputed, constituting an inflection point, if not a change in direction, of the GOP from a party that tried to exercise responsible governance, to a party that bent every effort to winning elections – and if that meant scanting on good governance or abandoning allegiances to democracy, that was a valid approach, too, for them.

This may seem counter-intuitive, but it’s worth remembering two points:

1. Good government policy is often an obscure business. For example, if high government debt is a concern, doesn’t it make sense for the government to print itself out of trouble? At one time, this was common sense, here and abroad, but now we know that this can and often does result in ruinous inflation. The human organism’s desire for quick fixes is often at odds with what turns out to be wise government policy. Additionally, even though this is the age of Turbo-Charged Communications, the fact of the matter is that information concerning what’s really going on in the major political parties is occulted, and often deliberately.
2. Government policy, at its most effective, is tuned to reality. The electorate, in most nations including the United States, often has its perception of reality refracted through the prism of religion. There’s enough religions out there to know that most, or, if my reader is an atheist, all religions are false. This deduction, in fact, is the basis for many bloody conflicts. This electorate’s prism, or prisms, means that expectations of the proxies of good government will diverge from reality and each other, and sometimes this divergence is quite marked. Playing to these divergences, or biases, is not good governance, but it will please that portion of the electorate to which they’re tuned, and thus attracting their votes.

There is a sense of what are the rules of politics among most Americans, often listed piecemeal and in reaction to perceived breaches of those rules. For example, depriving voters of the chance to vote through supposedly innocuous rule changes breaches those rules. Thus the attempts to divert attention from such changes when legislatures bring such rules to the fore.

The Democrats allege that many breaches of this sort have occurred since the days of Gingrich. Some have become the subject of lawsuits, such as gerrymandering cases (and one case sponsored by Republicans involving Maryland has accused Democrats of the same malfeasance), while others are the focus of intense legislative battles.

But the real point here is that those Republicans who’ve retained a sense of ethics, of morality, when it comes to politics, have been leaving the Republican Party over the years in reaction to these tactics, when they’re not being forcibly ejected via the RINO mechanism. In point of fact, the Republican Party has been approaching a pure form of what is best described as corruption. The missive from Professor Richardson reads like a condemnation sheet: Gaetz endangered by the confessions of Greenberg; hints from Cheney that McCarthy may have things to hide; a random claim from the mendacious Trump that a Maricopa elections database has been deleted, immediately refuted by Republicans in Maricopa; McConnell reprising the lessons of Gingrich, putting Party before Country; and then there’s the national embarrassment of Rep Greene, Rep Clyde, dah di dah di dah.

The beat goes on, and it’s all bad.

With Cheney removed from the House leadership, the last of the Republicans with a shred of ethics may be gone, and so now we can wait to see if the Republican Party explodes from sheer built-up bile and mendacity as they raise their hands once more to grasp the levers of power, or if they actually manage to achieve their goal and inflict upon America a veritable tidal wave of frenzied ideological & theological office holders, who’ll prove their unsuitability for office through incompetence, mendacity, criminality, and ephemerality (think: half-term Governor Sarah Palin (R-AK)).

It’ll be like those 100 year floods meteorologists like to use as adjectives.

That’s how Professor Richardson, in conjunction with 25+ years of watching politics, leaves me feeling today. The Republicans have only their ideological & theological positions to offer, and they are repugnant. They offer no reason for me to trust them, to think they are competent, to consider them worthy of elective office.

This is a dangerous situation for a big country like the United States.

From Democrat and former cop Eric Adams, candidate for the mayoral nomination of New York City:

The 60-year-old, who is Black and has said he was beaten by police as a teenager, also touts his credentials as a reformer inside and outside the New York Police Department. But police reform, he said, ranks lower among voter priorities. “It’s number three or four,” he said.

And Adams has not been afraid of appearing out of step with the reform movement. He has said stop-and-frisk — a much-maligned practice for which former mayor Mike Bloomberg apologized — can be a “great tool” when used correctly.

It is activists, Adams said, who are out of step with voters — especially those in the working class Black and Brown communities that have been his base.

“I’ve never been in a situation in which I hear people say ‘I want less police,’ ” Adams said. “Just because you’re the loudest and most organized doesn’t mean you’re in the majority.” [WaPo]

I suspect there’s a lot of civilians in the Twin Cities who’d agree with Adams’ statement enthusiastically, regardless of color. In the wake of Mayor Bottoms’ surprise announcement that she’d not be seeking reelection in Atlanta, from the same article:

… Felicia Moore, the city council president, who said in an interview that rebuilding the police department — which has lost more than 400 officers amid sagging morale — would be among her highest priorities.

“The number one issue across the city has been the rise in crime,” said Moore who, like Bottoms, is a Democrat. “People want to feel safer in their community.”

The collapse of the effort to defund the Minneapolis Police Department is another piece of what’s happening, and the use of the word defund by those looking for reformation of law enforcement was, and is, a bad choice, as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair notes:

“Defund the police” may be the left’s most damaging political slogan since “the dictatorship of the proletariat”. It leaves the right with an economic message which seems more practical, and a powerful cultural message around defending flag, family and fireside traditional values. To top it off, the right evinces a pride in their nation, while parts of the left seem embarrassed by the very notion.

His British perspective doesn’t invalidate his opinion for Americans: Communication choices directly influence perception, and ‘defund police‘ implies a weaker police force. With a big jump in gun violence in much of the Nation, this all plays out negatively. And this is unfortunate, because police reformation remains a promising approach to more effective first responders. Locally, Brooklyn Center just took a step towards reformation following the death by police shooting of Daunte Wright, who was wanted on armed robbery charges, as I understand it.

The City of Brooklyn Center on Saturday passed a sweeping public safety resolution that will change how policing is performed in the city, following the fatal April shooting of Daunte Wright. The resolution passed by a 4-1 vote.

The resolution, backed by Mayor Mike Elliott, intends to create new departments for community safety, which would oversee the existing police and fire departments, as well as create divisions of unarmed civilians to handle non-moving traffic violations and respond to mental health distress calls. [WCCO]

But it’s not clear that law enforcement is on-board.

Jim Mortenson, the executive director of Law Enforcement Labor Services, the union that represents Brooklyn Center police, says law enforcement was left out of the conversation on coming up with the resolution’s reforms.

“[Elliott] went outside of the city government to create this document and quite frankly, there’s a lot of errors in it when you look at the statutory issues in this document,” Mortenson said.

Elliott says input from local police was taken into account and that the city’s done its legal due diligence.

The live report on WCCO TV seemed to indicate a more vociferous response by the local union. The success of CAHOOTS should motivate law enforcement to endorse these reforms. But will they? I suspect unions will see the reduction in responsibility as a reduction in prestige and influence. In this respect, their opinions become a conflict of interest.

For readers interested in the Brooklyn Center action to remove traffic stops from police responsibilities, here’s a WaPo opinion piece on the subject from Yale Law student T J Grayson and Yale Law professor James Forman, Jr. Money quote:

Correlate of protection:

WE ARE getting closer to answering one of the most important remaining questions in the pandemic: how can we quickly test whether somebody is immune to the virus?

This elusive measurement of immunity is known as the correlate of protection: a simple, surrogate appraisal of the entire immune response that tells you whether somebody is protected against disease or infection. “So, for example, you measure the number of antibodies in blood and find that if you have a specific number you are protected,” says Christine Dahlke at the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany. That number is a correlate of protection, or CoP. We don’t yet have one for SARS-CoV-2, says Dahlke, but we urgently need one.

CoPs are a standard tool in vaccinology and, although difficult to nail down, we have established them for numerous conditions, including measles, influenza and hepatitis. Getting one for covid-19 would be a boost to our efforts to end the pandemic, says Dahlke. It would allow us to bypass big vaccine trials that compare a vaccine candidate against a placebo to see the difference in infection rates. Instead, we could do simpler and quicker tests that identify whether a vaccine elicits the CoP. [“We’ll soon be able to tell whether you are immune to covid-19,” Graham Lawton, NewScientist (1 May 2021, paywall)]

NewScientist recently interviewed Professor Suzanne Simard of the University of British Columbia, whose Ph.D. thesis in 1997 made the case that “…  forest trees share and trade food via fungal networks that connect their roots.” Since then?

[NewScientist] Is it too much to suggest that, like in a brain, there is intelligence in this network, even wisdom?

From a purely biological, physical analysis, it looked like it had the hallmarks of intelligence. Not just the communication of information and changes in behaviour as a result, but just the pure, evolved, biological chemistry and the shape of the networks themselves spoke to the idea that they were wired and designed for wisdom.

If you look at the sophisticated interactions between plants – and some of that happens through the networks – their ability to respond and change their behaviours according to this information all speaks of wisdom to me.

What about awareness? Are trees aware of us?

Plants are attuned to any kind of disturbance or injury, and we can measure their biochemical responses to that. We know that certain biochemical pathways are triggered to develop these cascades of chemicals that are responses to stresses and disturbances, like chewing by herbivores. And if they are so attuned to small injuries like that, why wouldn’t they be attuned to us? We’re the dominant disturbance agent in forests. We cut down trees. We girdle them. We tap them.

If I injure trees so much that they start to die, they start sending their carbon through their roots to their neighbours. They are responsive to us. We’ve proven it by doing our experiments. People go: “Oh, that’s kind of scary”. But why wouldn’t plants be aware of people? They are aware of everything else.

Which could be argued is simply a conserved trait of trees and not intelligence in itself. The trick behind the assertion is that we don’t know how to define intelligence, operationally or functionally – and whether or not only a single operationality applies, now do we?

This all leads to the question of whether we should respect trees for an asserted innate intelligence for which we have no method of interrogation, or because they are an integral part of our ecology, and if we imperil the forests further, we imperil ourselves?

I still have to wonder what part an apple tree plays in the intelligence of a forest.

But perhaps I am. For years I’ve been saying the RINO effect would eventually leave the Republican Party with three members – and two would be on probation. Well, the Party continues to shrink, as recent Gallup polling shows, but the ideological direction appears to be taking a turn – left, right, down, up, take your pick – as Daily Kos‘ Kerry Eleveld reports:

“What they’re going to open the door to is a situation where nobody’s Trumpy enough,” said former GOP Congresswoman Barbara Comstock, who lost her suburban Virginia seat in 2018 in the blue wave of anti-Trump sentiment that swept the nation. “It’s a problem for everybody.”

What I should have recognized is that there’s a limit to how far right one can go. It’s just an ideological certainty. But now it’s Trumpism that’s the goal, and that necessitates a change in ideological direction because there’s a fundamental difference between allegiance to principles and allegiance to personality.

Indeed, the latter is a lot like an absolute monarchy. The kind for which we held a Revolution, and it wasn’t a celebratory Revolution.

Trumpism is actually rather ill-defined, being characterized by a xenophobia – except when Trump likes your autocratic leader – and a provincialism, except when Trump thinks he can make money – and an allegiance to the latest in evangelical theology, such as an emphasis on prophecy – no apologies to those readers offended by the statement – and an even more important emphasis on Biblical verses involving Cyrus, a Persian king who accidentally delivered the Christians from Babylon, and functions as a Get Out Of Jail Free card for sanctifying evil.

So the new membership requirement of the GOP is a certain flexibility, and a concurrent willingness to accept that occasionally their beloved Leader will spit on them and prefer someone else, based on the treatment of former Rep Roby (R-AL). This will become a smaller and smaller segment of the electorate, as it’ll be emotionally taxing to live in that sort of atmosphere – and it leads to actions by the leaders that are absolutely at odds with reality, such as this dude, who has puzzled his own GOP colleague.

Right at the moment I’m foreseeing that in the next five years the Republican Party shrinking into irrelevance as people such as Amanda Chase (R-VA) destroy it from within. The noteworthy part will be the puzzlement of those involved. They’ll cry out that they had been Godly, that God had spoken to them, that they had done the right things.

And everyone else was evil.

And thus we’ll see the mistake of dragging dubious divinities into the project of wise governance.

The trick will be for the American electorate to see it for what it is, and to not permit single issue voters, the unsung weapon of the GOP – think gun control and abortion – to derail the country from selecting wise governance.

Aquaterra:

[Jonathan Benjamin at Flinders University] is part of a small band of underwater archaeologists who are raising their ambitions. To them, the seabed isn’t an inconsequential backdrop on which wrecks fester. It is a vast and complex drowned landscape, scattered with the remnants of ancient human lives. Since the ice sheets were at their peak about 20,000 years ago, rising seas have drowned at least 20 million square kilometres of coastal territory around the world – an area almost as large as the North American continent. Some even think of it as a lost, fragmented continent. They call it Aquaterra. [“Exploring ‘Aquaterra’, the drowned continent walked by our ancestors,” Colin Barras, NewScientist (17 April 2021, paywall)]

Ever wonder just how many members of a species has lived? A bunch of scientists wondered about that … for the venerable Tyrannosaurus rex. Here’s the abstract on their paper:

Although much can be deduced from fossils alone, estimating abundance and preservation rates of extinct species requires data from living species. Here, we use the relationship between population density and body mass among living species combined with our substantial knowledge of Tyrannosaurus rex to calculate population variables and preservation rates for postjuvenile T. rex. We estimate that its abundance at any one time was ~20,000 individuals, that it persisted for ~127,000 generations, and that the total number of T. rex that ever lived was ~2.5 billion individuals, with a fossil recovery rate of 1 per ~80 million individuals or 1 per 16,000 individuals where its fossils are most abundant. [Science]

Wow! But what’s the confidence level?

The uncertainties in these values span more than two orders of magnitude, largely because of the variance in the density–body mass relationship rather than variance in the paleobiological input variables.

Two orders of magnitude is a lot. But what fun, thinking of 2.5 billion hungry Tyrannosaurus rex critters running around .. looking for a bite to eat.

There’s been a culture war going on over the recent disappointing jobs report:

The U.S. economy added just 266,000 jobs in April, a disappointing month of growth that fell well below economists’ estimates despite declining virus caseloads and increased vaccine distribution around the country.

The April unemployment rate remained relatively unchanged at 6.1 percent, although economists caution that the number is misleadingly low, given how many people have dropped out of the labor force in the past year.

The news increased political pressure in Washington amid concerns about whether a labor shortage, reported in some pockets of the economy, is slowing down the recovery. The White House rejected that notion Friday, calling for patience and saying it will take the economy many months to recover from last year’s trauma.

For example, on the fringe-right, which is the only organized component of the right at the moment, Erick Erickson has an opinion:

I think we need to accept, at this point, that the Biden Administration and Democrat willingness to continue subsidizing Americans to stay unemployed is part of a plan to either force an employer-led increase in the minimum wage or try a universal basic income.

At this point, the evidence is too overwhelming that people are staying out of work because the federal unemployment benefit is so big. In fact, right now people do not even have to show proof they are attempting to find work in order to get the federal supplemental unemployment benefit. Nonetheless, as recently as Friday, Joe Biden insisted this was not true.

The Democrats are arguing that if employers just boost their wages, they’ll incentivize people coming back to work. The problem is many employers are already doing that and still cannot get workers to come back to work. Some people are fine making less on unemployment while doing no work and not having to worry about eviction thanks to additional federal policies.

But Adam Chandler disputes that:

And that’s not only because I’ve never heard of this before:

TikTokers are using Grabovoi codes, also known as “cheat codes” for the universe, to influence their health, wealth and love lives.

It’s no secret that manifestation, or the spiritual practice of bringing something tangible into your life through attraction and belief, is huge on TikTok right now. It is, in its most basic form, thinking about something really hard until it comes true (or doesn’t).

It might not magically work, but it certainly doesn’t hurt, and it orients your mind toward a goal that often benefits from that kind of focus anyway. For instance, if you try to manifest your soulmate, you might find your mind more open to the possibility of meeting new people, which could actually lead you to a lovely relationship. [Kelsey Weekman, Yahoo! Sports]

The first thought in my head?

The prosperity church movement’s Name it and claim it notion.

With which President Trump is infected.

Do they really want to wander down that slack minded hellpath?

Grump, grump, grump.

sui generis:

Sui generis (/ˌsuːiˈdʒɛnərɪs/ SOO-ee JEN-ər-iss,^[1] Latin: [ˈsʊ.iː ˈɡɛnɛrɪs]) is a Latin phrase that means “of its/his/her/their own kind, in a class by itself”, therefore “unique”. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Don’t blame George W. Bush for the GOP’s authoritarianism. It’s Trump’s fault,” Max Boot, WaPo:

Was President Donald Trump sui generis? Or was he merely the product of forces that had been gathering in the Republican Party for years?

Anti-vaxxers are, at last, facing the full power of the State, and I predict they’ll be losing big time.

The State is Ohio.

And the firepower?

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine on Wednesday announced a novel incentive program for people in his state to get vaccinated — a $1 million lottery.

DeWine, a Republican, said only people who’ve gotten the vaccine will be eligible to win the prize, which will be paid for by federal coronavirus funds.

“Two weeks from tonight on May 26th, we will announce a winner of a separate drawing for adults who have received at least their first dose of the vaccine. This announcement will occur each Wednesday for five weeks, and the winner each Wednesday will receive one million dollars,”DeWine said in a series of tweets. [NBC News]

Screw the free beer bribe – Governor DeWine (R-OH) knows how to get people to the needles. And if you’re young?

While the cash is for Ohioans 18 and older, he also added an incentive for younger residents — they’ll be entered into a drawing “for a four-year full scholarship to any of Ohio’s state colleges and universities, including full tuition, room, and board,” he announced.

I feel like shouting with admiration. The only question is whether it should have been a bigger prize. While Governor DeWine is a bit of a flake when it comes to abortion rights, you have to love this maneuver.

The anti-vaxxers will shrilly whine, but a whole lot of people who’ve been teetering on the edge will jump in for a chance to win some cash.

And it sure seems like the GOP Governors are far more competent than just about any of their brethren in Congress, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s because they have concentrated responsibilities and can’t just mutter that Fred will take care of it for me.

One of the sub-themes of good guys vs bad guys stories is that the bad guys often self-destruct through the instrumentality of self-: selfishness, self-absorption, self-pity, self-enrichment, and a few others.

And right here in real life we’re seeing the same thing happen with the Republicans, as Amanda Chase (R-VA), a losing candidate in the Virginia GOP gubernatorial last week – only third place – and a self-proclaimed “Trump in heels!” political animal, is making it clear that her loss isn’t ending her campaign for the Virginia governorship:

I want to begin by saying THANK YOU to ALL of my volunteers, supporters and amazing staff for their selfless commitment, hard work, sleepless weeks and grinding it out for 15 long months all because you believe in a cause that is much bigger than us: God, country, faith, freedom, individual liberty, religious freedom and putting an end to this tyrannical reign of a spineless Governor who has decimated our beloved Commonwealth.

Thank you for believing in me. While we came up short in yesterday’s rigged convention that allowed only 53k registered voters to choose our next Governor out of 1.9 million Virginians who voted for President Trump; God is still in control.

While I will have more to say in the days ahead I’m spending the rest of the week at the beach …

Notice how she clings to God, assuring the base that she’s in good with the Divine. Given the ascendancy of the clerics in power and influence in the Republican Party, this is a necessary proclamation on her part. And she’s not done with God yet:

Obviously, yesterday’s results weren’t what we were expecting. That said we both have peace knowing God sees the future and He is in control.

Because that relieves you of responsibility. But there’s even more!

The rest of this week we are going off the grid to reconnect, pray and ask God for direction.

So Chase is doing her level best to spread dissent and doubt about her own political party. She presents no evidence, you’ll notice, but instead points to God, which is even better than Trump did, who just stated that elections were rigged with neither evidence nor pointing at the Divine, which incidentally could manufacture just such evidence – if the Divine exists.

At this point, I’d say the Democrats, if they can nominate someone competent who doesn’t have skeletons in the closet, past or future, are a lock for the gubernatorial contest – and possibly for picking up a few local seats at the city and state levels. Why? Because the Republicans, if they take Chase seriously, will become disgusted with the entire political process and walk away.

As they should. Unless Chase can come up with credible evidence of cheating, the voters should reprimand her and the Party, and this is how you do it. The Party should never have given her any encouragement to run without evidence that she was willing to play by the rules.

If Chase really is Trump in heels, then this is all about her ego, because that’s all Trump is about. No nods to competency, legacy, or anything the voters will value. Chase wants to be governor because it’ll be good for her ego and it’ll prove that God favors her.

And thus we see one of the poisons of permitting the Divine get involved in politics.

Rep Andrew Clyde (R-GA) proves to be completely loyal to President Trump – or perhaps his own ambitions:

Later in the hearing, Georgia Republican Andrew Clyde denied that there was any insurrection at all.

“As one of the members who stayed in the Capitol and on the House floor, who with other Republican colleagues helped barricade the door until almost 3 p.m. that day from the mob who tried to enter, I can tell you the House floor was never breached and it was not an insurrection,” Clyde said. “This is the truth.” [Roll Call]

If his family get-togethers are anything like this …

I think I’m just as happy not to have married into his family.

Michigan Republicans are going further than they realize with this threat:

Michigan state Rep. Matt Maddock and his wife, Michigan Republican Party co-chair Meshawn Maddock, have repeatedly been called out by fact-checking journalists for promoting baseless claims of widespread voter fraud and falsely suggesting that covid-19 is comparable to the flu.
Now, the Republican lawmakerwants to create new obstacles for fact-checkers who might challenge politicians over unsubstantiated claims.

“My legislation will put Fact Checkers on notice: don’t be wrong, don’t be sloppy, and you better be right,” Maddock wrote in a Facebook post announcing his proposal last week.

Maddock’s bill, the Fact Checker Registration Act, was introduced Tuesday andwould require fact-checkers to register with the state and insure themselves with $1 million fidelity bonds. Any fact-checker who did not register with the state could face a $1,000 per day fine. The proposed legislation would also allow anyone to sue a fact-checker over “any wrongful conduct that is a violation of the laws of this state.” [WaPo]

It seems unlikely this attempt at suppressing the free press will go anywhere. If it makes it into law, some of the big players in the free press will sue, and a judge will fold the law up and toss it in the trash can.

But the real problem is that this is an attempt to take away the responsibilities of the citizens. They are the consumers of the free press, and it’s up to them to be the fact checkers of the fact checkers. By attempting to muzzle the fact checks, the Maddocks are really telling the citizens that there’s nothing to see here, no evaluation needed, and whatever WaPo is saying should be … ignored.

Telling the citizens that they’re really just irresponsible babies, and the Michigan GOP will take care of them.

Now that’s disrespectful.

A stripey cat, who gets to be an honorary flower today.

She used to peep at lot, so she is named Peeper.

And a reminder of how bad it could be.

Snow is not unknown in May.

Corpus Linguistics:

Corpus linguistics is the study of language based on large collections of “real life” language use stored in corpora (or corpuses)—computerized databases created for linguistic research. It is also known as corpus-based studies.

Corpus linguistics is viewed by some linguists as a research tool or methodology and by others as a discipline or theory in its own right. Sandra Kübler and Heike Zinsmeister state in their book, “Corpus Linguistics and Linguistically Annotated Corpora,” that “the answer to the question whether corpus linguistics is a theory or a tool is simply that it can be both. It depends on how corpus linguistics is applied.”

Although the methods used in corpus linguistics were first adopted in the early 1960s, the term itself didn’t appear until the 1980s. [ThoughtCo.]

Noted in “Pro-tip: When a Judge Asks You to Make a Corpus-Based Argument, Don’t Say Corpus Linguistics is Stupid,” James Hellpern, The Juris Lab:

This is the second time that a Circuit court panel has ordered the parties to provide supplemental briefing in order to provide the court with corpus-based arguments. As a handy practice tip, it’s safe to assume that if a judges specifically requests corpus-based arguments, she has already concluded that corpus linguistics is a helpful tool at least in theory. She may have questions about whether corpus linguistics would be helpful in the particular case before her or she may lack the confidence in her own ability to navigate and interpret the databases herself, but if she is actually ordering parties to devote time and resources making corpus-based arguments, it’s safe to assume that she’s already sold on the law and corpus linguistics movement as a whole.

This happens to be in connection with a 2^nd Amendment case.

At least in the computer field. Remember the NotPetya malware? Unlike the ransomware that hit Colonial Pipeline earlier this week, it wasn’t reversible, making it a tool of vandalism – I shan’t dignify it was the ‘ware’ suffix, which might make it seem sexy or something. It’s just a vandal’s tool.

This interview with Adam Banks, the Chief Technology & Information Officer of Maersk, the big shipping concern that was one of the victims of NotPetya, is revealing:

“All end-user devices, including 49,000 laptops and print capability, were destroyed,” he says. “All of our 1,200 applications were inaccessible and approximately 1,000 were destroyed. Data was preserved on back-ups but the applications themselves couldn’t be restored from those as they would immediately have been re-infected. Around 3,500 of our 6,200 servers were destroyed — and again they couldn’t be reinstalled.”

The cyber-attack also hit communications. All fixed line phones were inoperable due to the network damage and, because they’d been synchronized with Outlook, all contacts had been wiped from mobiles — severely hampering any kind of coordinated response.

Maersk was hardly the only company experiencing an IT meltdown at the hands of NotPetya: food and beverage manufacturer Mondelez, pharmaceutical giant Merck, advertising agency WPP, health and hygiene products maker Reckitt Benckiser, French construction company Saint-Gobain and FedEx’s European subsidiary TNT Express were among thousands of multinationals impacted. [Global Intelligence for Digital Leaders]

Staggering by sheer numbers.

It seems to me that the measure of your vulnerability correlates to how closely you approach 1 in the monoculture metric – that is, if all your company uses is Microsoft, you’re going to be a 1. Doubt it?

Banks is candid about the breadth of the impact: “There was 100% destruction of anything based on Microsoft that was attached to the network.”

And it appears the closer your company is to a 1, the more likely blackmailers and vandals can inflict serious damage on your company.

This raises the question, no doubt already under discussion or even answered among IT security professionals: do we limit our efforts to trying to stop the initial infection, or do we accept that occasionally it will happen and structure the systems to resist and hinder the spread of such software once it’s become present in a company’s networks? And how much does that add to our costs?

When you’re just making shit up so that people look up to you, introducing Cirsten Weldon:

“Yeah, [Hillary Clinton] passed a long time ago,” Weldon said in a video shared on Friday by Right Wing Watch, a project of the progressive group People for the American Way. “I don’t think it was 2018, I think it was about 8 months ago, she died of kuru. And that was not from… she wasn’t hanged or anything, she just expired… Hillary was on stage four, they couldn’t help her. She was barely taking a breath a minute.”

Weldon added that German Chancellor Angela Merkel also suffered from kuru, but was “stage three,” and went on to claim that Clinton’s former campaign manager John Podesta “has been seized a long time ago.” She added that she believed infrequent appearances in the media were evidence that several others, like former Clinton aide Huma Abedin and former FBI Director James Comey, had “obviously” been seized as well. [Newsweek]

Seized? Beats me. In any case, another sad case of power before ethics. But this part’s a bit puzzling for a non-Q like me:

She also bragged about knowing “the location of every NASA office” and said she would be delivering speeches at “each and every” one of the space agency’s offices once “our POTUS,” former President Donald Trump, “comes back” into the White House.

I don’t doubt she thinks she knows about all those NASA offices, but why in the world would anyone care if she gave a speech at them or not?

Playa:

Place yourself in the heart of the Great Plains, say, somewhere in the Texas Panhandle. A long, lonely stretch of interstate extends before you. Prairie grass and planted wheat cover the landscape out to the horizon, flat as a table in all directions.

But it’s not truly flat. Even on these plains there are low spots, the ground sloping almost imperceptibly toward slight, bowl-shaped depressions where the infrequent rains of this semi-arid environment collect. These are playas: wetlands that come and go, providing an oasis for life in an otherwise desiccated place. [“These Wetlands Feed The Largest Aquifer In The U.S. What Happens If We Lose Them?” John Richard Saylor, Discover (May 2021)]

Totally new to me.

The tulips have said goodbye:

And now the Spirea is taking center stage.

The admirable and talented Randy Rainbow:

Alex Estorick, Kyle Waters, and Chloe Diamond on Artnome present an analysis of CryptoArt aesthetics – I think:

We studied the historical data on works of NFT Art across the SuperRare marketplace*. This is what we found.

*Data as of end of March 2021

• Futuristic, retro and sci-fi themes are frequently explored and highly coveted by collectors

• “3d” art is the most viewed with higher selling points, perhaps reflecting a ‘medium’ specific to crypto art

• In general, number of views highly correlates with price: the hype machine is real

• As in the traditional art world, NFTs tagged with “drawing” tend to sell for less

• The average color palette of NFTs tends toward purple, reinforcing an aesthetics rooted in technostalgia

We have sought to identify, based on available data, what NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are actually contributing to visual culture beyond simply fuel for financial speculation and environmental extraction. Our premise has been that it stands to benefit crypto artists to be aware of their community’s aesthetic and thematic priorities. However, the data may also be of interest to traditional fine artists, who may be looking to migrate to an artistic arena less dependent on intermediaries than the contemporary art scene, and who might bring with them certain conceptual tools which could prove valuable to crypto art’s long-term future.

To which my Arts Editor replies:

Apparently, there’s a sucker born every minute. Only now, they have bitcoin to throw away.

She later said she was feeling Old and Crotchety.

But I think she’s more or less of my mind on this: The ability to easily copy digital arts renders “ownership” a tenuous concept to attempt to transfer from the Real World to the Virtual World.

To my mind, this continuing question, which has plagued real world arts to a lesser, but real, extent, may motivate a re-thinking of the purpose and support of art in society. To an extent, this has happened before. I, who I emphasize has no academic background in Art History, am thinking of the murals of the Great Depression period. A form of public art, the economic support for the artists was not based on the economic model of creating and transferring ownership, which includes control of who may experience the art, but rather government support for art that can be viewed by anyone who can access the venue.

Of course, for those whose opinion of that art is that it’s objectionable for its content, their enforced contribution via taxes is a valid concern. More informal funding mechanisms, such as voluntary contributions, may be more preferable – but are they practical?

Similarly, and perhaps as Beatriz Helena Ramos purposed, CryptoArt needs to undergo a similar transformation. The question that needs to be answered is how to determine the recompense of artists. Will it be the mistaken Marxist The harder they work the more they get? Or how about If I can sell shit in cans to collectors, I’m a great artist?

I’m looking forward to the future explorations of this solution space.

So I’m reading Erick Erickson’s latest missive:

At this point, the evidence is too overwhelming that people are staying out of work because the federal unemployment benefit is so big. In fact, right now people do not even have to show proof they are attempting to find work in order to get the federal supplemental unemployment benefit. Nonetheless, as recently as Friday, Joe Biden insisted this was not true.

The Democrats are arguing that if employers just boost their wages, they’ll incentivize people coming back to work. The problem is many employers are already doing that and still cannot get workers to come back to work. Some people are fine making less on unemployment while doing no work and not having to worry about eviction thanks to additional federal policies.

The consequences of these policies are going to be disastrous for the nation.

[Bold mine]

I was wondering how to evaluate this claim. And then it  suddenly occurred to me:

• Gay marriage hasn’t ruined anyone’s marriage.
• Churches weren’t forced to marry gays.
• The ACA hasn’t ruined America.
• Lowering corporate taxes didn’t save America.
• America isn’t a smoking crater because of abortion rights.
• There’s been no plague of promiscuity because of the HPV vaccine.
• Regulations haven’t choked America to death.
• President Biden is not showing signs of being a doddering fool.
• International polls of American reputation do not show it plunging after Biden’s assumption of office, unlike Trump’s.
• The stock market isn’t a smoking crater because Trump lost.

In other words, the Republicans operate as a doomsday machine because that’s how the base has been trained. There’s an insistent drumbeat of doom: taxes are too high and soon we’ll all be poverty stricken, if we permit gun control the government will enslave us all, JADE HELM JADE HELM JADE HELM OH MY GOD, regulation is too stifling!,  inflation will go through the roof if we implement Quantitative Easing!, abortion is unGodly and turning us into a charnel pit, omigodomigodomigod add your favorite cry of horror HERE.

And it all never comes true.

But the Republican base expects it, between training on the political side and the traditional insistence that the End Times are upon us!, from the pulpit to popular entertainment (see the Left Behind series by LaHaye). The World is perpetually coming to an end is the motivating message for the Republicans, from national to local races.

And. It’s. Just. Never. True.

So why should I take Erickson seriously? I’ve noticed he’s hardly every accurate except when he’s critiquing his own side. Trump did lose, as he feared. The atmosphere of the conservatives was conducive to disaster for them, as shown in the iconic January 6th insurrection. But where are the riots that were to follow RBG’s death and Barrett’s hearings?

And so I lose my motivation to even take him seriously. The Republicans have blown their credibility ever since at least Gingrich, if not Reagan, and it just makes them that much more of a loss for the Nation.

But that’s what happens to third and fourth raters, and theocrats. The End Times is the only tool they really have.