Monthly Archives: June 2021

Hemant Mehta of Friendly Atheist expresses amazement that one of the far-right grifters preachers has admitted that Christian persecution doesn’t actually exist in the United States:

Christian hate-preacher Steven Anderson has been mostly banned from YouTube, but in a sermon today, he admitted that Christian "persecution" (as conservatives use the term) doesn't exist.

"Out of 100, we’re at, like, Persecution Level 3."

More tomorrow, but here's a mash-up: pic.twitter.com/cOtYeNIbMG

— Hemant Mehta (@hemantmehta) June 21, 2021

And here, where he provides a partial transcript of Mr. Anderson, sadly protected from copying. However, my summary above is sufficient.

I have to wonder if Anderson’s parishioners have been looking around and noting the lack of Christian persecution, and he found it necessary to, shall we say, adjust the message? It must be tough to adjust your cap for being dragged off to jail for howling forth the Word, but if the jackboots never come for you, well, it’s gotta be a little deflating.

And, of course, noting that the lack of persecution didn’t change when Biden took office, well, at some point only the most steadfast adherents will stick around. Anderson, having been banned from YouTube, has enough on his plate to mark him as an extremist preacher; he can let this particular message go with little to no damage to his reputation. In fact, Australian organization Voice of the Martyrs has a useful map: of Christian persecution in the world:

Look for this entire class of Christian messaging to fade away as reality wreaks its usual havoc. The real question will become: what’s the replacement message, designed to keep the faithful in line?

Erick Erickson has been on a campaign to claim real people for the Republicans. For instance, today’s advance is against Twitter, a platform for which I have little sentiment:

Eric Adams won in New York City [this is premature, but I’ll stipulate to it as the polls had him in the lead going in to last night. -haw]. Had you followed along on social media, you’d have presumed he would lose. He had two percent of Andrew Yang’s Twitter support and Andrew Yang was the first candidate to drop out last night after the results started coming in. …

The data more and more shows Twitter is not real life. Election results are showing those who equate Twitter with reality will wake up to cold hard truths on Election Day. Journalists, if they have an ounce of self-reflective abilities, should realize they need to spend less time searching the thoughts of Mordor on Twitter and get out into real America.

He bases some of this on this:

Pew Research has done an in-depth report on Twitter. It turns out that Twitter is overwhelmingly not of the left, but of the very left. Were Twitter a state, it would be the most progressive state in the nation — further left than Hawaii or Vermont — and if it were a congressional district, it’d be the most Democratic congressional district in the country.

All of which ignores one little elephant: the Elephant named Trump. It’s indisputable that Trump, as much as anyone could, dominated Twitter until he was banned from the platform.

Shall we apply the Erickson’s judgment to the Twitter Trump followers, even Trump himself, and deem him and them as unrepresentative of conservatives?

Erickson can jump up and down as much as he likes, claiming that “real people” are Republicans, but the polls suggest otherwise: not many people like having insurrections happen to their country, and there’s no reasonable way to interpret the actions of most of the Congressional GOP as not being supportive of the insurrection, to which I’ll add denying the realities, as discovered by the FBI, of the insurrection amounts to supporting the insurrection.

Since I’m here, I’ll also note he takes a shot at ranked-choice voting (RCV):

Lastly, the popular wave of rank choice voting, which will cause New York City to spend weeks determining a winner of the Democrat primary and ultimately the mayor, got started by academics and was picked up by the horde of Mordor rushing across Twitter. Everyone on Twitter thinks it is a good idea. New York City embraced it because the nerds said everyone on Twitter liked it. Now the city realizes it probably should not have done it. Too late.

Minneapolis, just down the road for us, uses RCV, and I have yet to hear any complaints. Quite honestly, while this is not a hard and fast rule, my suspicion is that if you don’t like RCV, you may be an extremist. RCV is, I think, a path towards victories by moderates. The capture of a political party by extremists, along with the implementation of toxic team politics, a subject I’ve discussed too much, is not sufficient to capture an election in a vulnerable district where RCV is used. Let a moderate enter a race and get their name on the ballot – or even run a Murkowski-esqe write-in campaign – and they’re likely to capture the first votes of the moderates and the second votes of the extremists. But the moderates may not vote for the extremists at all, leaving the moderate with all the votes on that side of the spectrum.

And leave extremists, like Erickson and most of the GOP leadership, sitting on their ass at the bus station, thumb out, looking for that ride out of town.

Erickson is tasked with helping make the Republicans look good and win elections, and he has a long ways to go.

Gallup recently released a new poll:

After doubling last spring and staying elevated in December, the percentage of Americans who believe that religion is increasing its influence on American life has retreated to 16%, in line with pre-pandemic levels.

I suppose a lot of questions could be asked about what this means. Does the big leap in late 2019 and early 2020 reflect the stress of the pandemic? If so, why does it fall off until now it’s back to the old mean?

I’ll be interested in seeing the next couple of data points.

If it stays at the mean, then we can guess there’s not much change in the fundamentals of Americans’ perceptions of the influence of religion on American society.

But if it falls below substantially? That might suggest that the pandemic, after its initial provocation of folks to turn to religion for comfort, began causing religious adherents to realize that religion’s promises were hollow. This graph may reflect a fear that I believe afflicted many clerics: without the in-person meetings, the strengthening of social bonds that are useful for engendering compliance with religious tithing, people lose that urge to attend religious institutions. After all, at least here in the United States, we look for payoffs for what we do, whether it’s using coupons, helping the poor, going to work, or seeking to propitiate the deity of our choice.

If you pray for you and yours to be delivered from Covid, and then Uncle Ray dies of it, miserably alone in a hospital, that may bash a hole in your faith, no matter how much we chant that dismaying phrase, God has a plan….

But that’s all speculation. We shall see. I actually expect it’ll stabilize right where it’s at.

And it’s milkweed. I got a couple of odd perspective pics.

However, they’re starting to pop up in the lawn. Not so good.

Mucormycosis:

“It’s a form of flesh-eating fungus that destroys tissues as it grows,” said Akshay Nair, an oculoplastic surgeon treating mucormycosis patients in Mumbai. Before the pandemic, Nair would see 10 such patients in a year, but since January, he has treated nearly 100 affected patients. “If it involves the sinus, they have to be cleared. If it involves the eye — the eyeball, lids, muscles around the eye have to be removed, leaving behind the bare, bony socket.” [“The deadly black fungus striking India’s recovering covid patients,” Ronny Sen and Niha Masih, WaPo]

I’m at a loss for words.

I wish I subscribed to the Wall Street Journal so’s I could read a particular opinion piece with my own two eyes, but instead I’ll have to depend on Professor Richardson:

More telling, perhaps, is an eye-popping op-ed published yesterday in the Wall Street Journal by Mike Solon, a former assistant to [Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY)], and Bill Greene, a former outreach director for former House Speaker John Boehner; both men are now lobbyists. In order to defend the filibuster, they argue that the measure protects “political nobodies” from having to pay attention to politics. If legislation could pass by a simple majority, Americans would have to get involved. The system, they suggest, is best managed by a minority of senators.

“Eliminating the Senate filibuster would end the freedom of America’s political innocents,” they write. “The lives that political nobodies spend playing, praying, fishing, tailgating, reading, hunting, gardening, studying and caring for their children would be spent rallying, canvassing, picketing, lobbying, protesting, texting, posting, parading and, above all, shouting.”

The authors suggest misleadingly that the men who framed the Constitution instituted the filibuster: they did not. They set up a Senate in which a simple majority passed legislation. The filibuster, used to require 60 votes to pass any legislation, has been deployed regularly only since about 2008.

Presuming this is accurate, I’d have to respond that Monitoring the Senators and Representatives who we, the citizens, have voted for is among the most important duties incumbent upon the citizens of the United States, as with any democracy, along with taking action when their competence is unsatisfying, or their positions lead to poor results.

Solon and Greene are basically advocating for the citizens to fail in their duties, to become not unlike foolish chikldren.

Solon and Greene are little more than wannabe autocrats, terrified of the change that actual citizen participation might bring.

Curious about soil dampness over the centuries? The Guardian has a neat presentation here. Money quote:

But here’s the astounding part: Williams and his team also estimated what drought conditions would look like if human activities had not caused global warming … and they found that we would still likely be living through a once-in-a-century drought – but human activity accounts for about 46% of the severity of the current megadrought.

I tend to see the weather as a massive non-linear system ala Chaos Theory, so I’m not quite sure I can sit comfortably with that assertion. Still, the last few years in the graph was quite instructive, wasn’t it?

Peter Beinart, another in a list of writers recommended by Andrew Sullivan (h/t, in other words), thinks we’re entering an era of illiberalism:

Now, as Netanyahu’s twelve years in power come to an end, there’s reason to believe that he was right [that the future belongs to authoritarian capitalism]. Over the last decade, leaders in his mold have sprung up across the globe. When Netanyahu returned as Israel’s prime minister in 2009, his chauvinistic, free market hyper-nationalism appeared anachronistic. Then, the following year, Viktor Orban reclaimed the prime ministership of Hungary. In 2012, Putin returned as President of Russia and Xi became General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. In 2014, Narendra Modi became prime minister of India. In 2017, Donald Trump became president of the United States. In 2019, Jair Bolsonaro became president of Brazil. All of a sudden, Netanyahu was elder statesman of a club of authoritarian, populist bigots. That’s his global legacy. In Israel-Palestine, Netanyahu will be remembered for having dug the two-state solution’s grave. But internationally, he’s done something bigger: He’s helped to father our illiberal age.

He may be right, but I have suspicions about extending trend lines with no interrogation of those people on the backs of which these extensions rest. As they observe a lack of disaster when the coalition replacing Netanyahu take power, as Biden continues to provide quietly competent leadership, etc etc, these folks who previously supported these dubious characters, at least in the democracies, may quietly give up on them, even refuse to admit to having supported them out of simple embarrassment.

Be that as it may, I prefer a different label, based on Beinart’s own statement, and that would be The Era Of Enormous Fucking Egos:

And, like Trump, Netanyahu’s communication style has always included large doses of lying. From the British officials who nicknamed Bibi “the armor-plated bullshitter” to Bill Clinton aide Joe Lockhart, who recalled that Netanyahu “could open his mouth and you could have no confidence that anything that came out of it was the truth” to Netanyahu’s own former aide, Limor Livnat, who Caspit and Kfir quote as saying that, “You cannot believe a word he says,” people who dealt with Netanyahu have long noted his fraught relationship with the truth. Which helps explain why, when prosecuted for corruption, Netanyahu responded with a campaign of brazen deceit that threatened to delegitimize Israel’s judicial system.

The irony is that Netanyahu has long seen himself as this era’s Winston Churchill, the man courageous enough to stare evil in the face when other leaders preferred appeasement. The two men do have things in common: Churchill was a racist too. But, nonetheless, Churchill helped lead a global coalition that defended liberal democracy in its hour of peril. Netanyahu has done something closer to the opposite: He has helped to lead the coalition of authoritarians that now imperils liberal democracy across the globe.

Sure, leadership nearly always requires an ego at the national level. But when it involves chronic mendacity, a fixation on reputation rather than essential truth, then it’s intolerable in a leader.

Sessile:

In botany, sessility (meaning “sitting”, used in the sense of “resting on the surface”) is a characteristic of plant parts that have no stalk.^[1][2] Flowers or leaves are borne directly from the stem or peduncle, and thus lack a petiole or pedicel. The leaves of most monocotyledons lack petioles. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Debunking the ACLU’s ‘4 Myths About Trans People’,” Colin Wright, Reality’s Last Stand:

Is sex binary? The use of the term “binary” is one that many seem to trip over. According to the dictionary definition, binary means “consisting of, indicating, or involving two.” As a biologist, I can confidently say this definition accurately describes biological sex. That is because the sex of an individual refers to one of two—and only two—functional roles that an individual may play in sexual reproduction. Males are defined as the sex that produces small, motile gametes (sperm), and females produces large, sessile gametes (ova). There is no third gamete between sperm and ova, and therefore there is no third biological sex apart from males and females. Intersex is an umbrella term that refers to external sex ambiguity or a mismatch between internal sexual anatomy and external phenotype, but it is not a third sex.

While reading Noah Smith’s summary of disasters that didn’t happen during the pandemic, it occurred to me that Senator McConnell (R-KY) might be a trifle disappointed in this one:

4) State budgets are healthy

The Great Recession clobbered state budgets, and they never really recovered. It was natural to expect that the COVID-19 recession would have the same effect. Most people predicted giant budget gaps and called urgently for a federal bailout of the states. Here’s Brookings, from April 2020:

[I]n the coming months, states will experience large declines in tax revenues and increased enrollment in safety-net programs as disruptions caused by COVID-19 drive incomes and consumption lower. Without assistance from the federal government, states will likely be forced to make deep program cuts, enact substantial tax increases, or both.

But fortunately, the crisis never happened. The relief bills raised income, and that income got taxed, filling states’ coffers. Capital gains taxes resulting from the big stock market boom helped too. This May it was reported that California has a $75.5 billion budget surplus. New York has a more modest surplus, as does Texas.

In fact, by the time Biden gave states a big dollop of federal cash, most probably no longer needed it.

It’s a known rumor that Senator McConnell would love to see state budgets, plural, get into trouble, because then the judiciary might assign a judge to supervise a state’s budget – and that might result in the big slashes in those budgets that he’d like to see.

No such luck this time, Moscow Mitch.

Stephen J. K. Walters, chief economist at the Maryland Public Policy Institute, etc, has a countering view on the Baltimore phenomenon of lowered violent crime during the pandemic. Briefly, he’s not a fan and thinks we’re seeing rank amateurism from prosecutor Marilyn Mosby:

And now Baltimore is among the national vanguard in a new trend: de-prosecution. While it was widely perceived that early in her tenure Mosby put the brakes on prosecution of many “low-level” crimes, once the pandemic began she made that policy explicit (nominally to ensure that overcrowded prisons not become Covid spreaders). She dismissed over 1,400 pending criminal cases and quashed as many warrants for possession or “attempted distribution” of controlled dangerous substances, prostitution, trespassing, public urination or defecation, minor traffic offenses, and more.

A year later, she revealed that this policy was not just a Covid palliative but an experiment with human subjects; declaring it a big success, she proclaimed that “the era of ‘tough on crime’ prosecutors is over in Baltimore.” She pointed to a 20 percent reduction in violent crime and a 35 percent decline in property crime in the first quarter of 2021 compared with the same period last year. With all the confounding variables at work during the pandemic, of course, no social scientist worth her salt would proclaim such a complex experiment complete—much less successful—with just a year’s worth of data (or a subsample thereof).

When you’ve got data you like, however, “the science” or logic can be overlooked. So Mosby claimed that a 33 percent decline in 911 calls mentioning drugs and a 50 percent decline in calls mentioning sex work during her experiment proves that “there is no public safety value in prosecuting these offenses.” To the contrary: with drug use and prostitution de facto legal in Baltimore, many residents still wasted their time calling the cops about the dealers, junkies, hookers, or johns on their block. [City Journal]

He thinks … well …

A simpler explanation is that Mosby is just not very good at her job. Pre-pandemic, violent crime surged on her watch; homicides (averaging 55 per 100,000 residents) have run one-fifth higher than in any prior administration. Conviction rates fell as soon as she took office. According to Sean Kennedy of the Maryland Public Policy Institute, in 2017 only 12 percent of murder, attempted murder, or conspiracy-to-commit-murder cases resulted in a guilty plea or verdict for the murder charge. In 2018, only 18 percent of gun-crime defendants were found guilty.

It’s not the kind of statement designed to elicit agreement and analysis from the inside, but it may be accurate. It’s worth noting, though, that Walters is a fan of the Broken Windows philosophy of policing, which raises a red flag for me. If he had considered and rejected the lead poisoning theory of crime waves, then I’d be contingently happier, but he betrays no consciousness of it – which leaves me wondering if he’s well versed in the subject, or simply doesn’t like the work of Mosby.

But Walters provides a lot of context to the crime drama in Baltimore, so it’s worth a read.

[h/t Andrew Sullivan]

Moral risk:

In economics, moral hazard occurs when an entity has an incentive to increase its exposure to risk because it does not bear the full costs of that risk. For example, when a corporation is insured, it may take on higher risk knowing that its insurance will pay the associated costs. A moral hazard may occur where the actions of the risk-taking party change to the detriment of the cost-bearing party after a financial transaction has taken place.

Moral hazard can occur under a type of information asymmetry where the risk-taking party to a transaction knows more about its intentions than the party paying the consequences of the risk and has a tendency or incentive to take on too much risk from the perspective of the party with less information. One example is a principal–agent problem, where one party, called an agent, acts on behalf of another party, called the principal. If the agent has more information about his or her actions or intentions than the principal then the agent may have an incentive to act too riskily (from the viewpoint of the principal) if the interests of the agent and the principal are not aligned. [Wikipedia]

I assume Moral Risk and Moral Hazard are more or less synonyms. Noted in “Not That Innocent,” Elizabeth Bruenig, The Atlantic:

He shouldn’t have done what he did, none of it; nor should we have given him the opportunity to do what he did from death row, which we did when we created the machinery of capital punishment. Killing never reduces moral risk; there’s no cosmic ledger it can, by subtraction, set right, and no slate it can wash clean with the right amount of blood. In this way the lives of the innocent are no different from the lives of the guilty. The abolition of the death penalty will likely rest on whether we are willing to make that case.

I’m not quite sure why, but I found this particularly repellent:

According to [Marissa Bluestine, the assistant director of the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School], unsavory actors have taken advantage of the profusion of innocence organizations to exploit anxious inmates marked for death. “There is this weird cottage industry of folks who are under the radar—and I think they are completely predatory and disgusting,” she said. “They will reach out to folks who are incarcerated, [and] offer to review their case and present it to a conviction-integrity unit, saying it’ll only cost you $2,500. And they have no intention of doing any work.” Bluestine said she has worked with clients who have lost money and resources, such as transcripts with only one extant copy, to scams masquerading as innocence efforts. None of which is to say that genuine innocence programs are responsible for their malicious imposters—only that the proliferation of scattered innocence groups across the judicial landscape has given the fakes room to grow. [Elizabeth Bruenig, The Atlantic]

I suppose an innocence program, which advocates for convicts for whom there is some credible doubt as to their guilt, is simply trading in a product, and as such grifters/scammers are attracted due to the desperate circumstances of the customers.

Some years the poppies hardly even show up for summer. This year?

Good, clean fun.

I hope that I’ve restored the navigation links at the top of the post for individual post display.

For independent political observers, this WaPo article on Biden Administration hiring practices has potential significance:

Barely a week into office, President Biden made a promise that signaled a sharp break from his predecessor: No member of his family would be involved in government.

But that vow did not extend to his senior staff and their relatives. In the first few months of Biden’s presidency, at least five children of his top aides have secured coveted jobs in the new administration. They include two sons and a daughter of the White House counselor, the daughter of a deputy White House chief of staff and the daughter of the director of presidential personnel.

The pattern — which continued this week with the Treasury Department’s announcement that it was hiring J.J. Ricchetti, son of Biden counselor Steve Ricchetti — has drawn concerns from ethics experts, diversity advocates and others. They say it is disappointing that Biden didn’t shift even further from the practices of Donald Trump’s presidency, which they felt reeked of nepotism and cronyism.

I think the ethics experts have every right to be concerned. Good government is about hiring the best qualified, a positive statement, while avoiding hiring those with political connections where possible, which is a negative statement. Both are important, because the latter is a message that the corruption that comes with hiring family and friends with little to no regard for relevant expertise is not acceptable.

And Biden needs to send the message that we are committed to good government, rather than sliding into bad government, after the ethical disaster that was the Trump Administration. So this qualifies as a disappointment for me. This is only somewhat ameliorated by the highly qualified nature of some of those hires:

Stephanie Psaki has a Ph.D. in public health from Johns Hopkins University and her work has been published in leading journals such as The Lancet, according to her HHS biography. Medina is a former deputy undersecretary of Commerce for oceans and atmosphere and former special assistant to the secretary of Defense.

Others also come with a long list of credentials, such as White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s wife, Maggie Goodlander, who works as counsel to Attorney General Merrick Garland, for whom she clerked when he was an appellate judge. Sullivan’s brother, Tom Sullivan, is a State Department official and Tom’s wife, Rose Sullivan, is an official at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Something to keep an eye on.

The Minnesota State Fair is hosting the Back to the ’50s gang again, and my Arts Editor snapped some pics.

Positively glowing.

Some nice trucks.

Here’s our favorite, too cute for words.

And here’s a mystery car.

My Arts Editor thinks it’s an elderly T-bird.

De fide:

De fide (of the faith) is a “theological note” “theological qualification” that indicates that some religious doctrine is an essential part of Catholic faith and that denial of it is heresy.^[1] The doctrine is de fide divina et ecclesiastica (of divine and ecclesiastical faith), if contained in the sources of revelation and therefore believed to have been revealed by God (de fide divina) and if taught by the Church (de fide ecclesiastica). If a doctrine has been solemnly defined by a pope or an ecumenical council as a dogma, the doctrine is de fide definita. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “US Catholic bishops advance communion document, setting up potential rebuke of Biden,” Tom Foreman, CNN/Politics:

“I accept my church’s position on abortion as a what we call de fide doctrine. Life begins at conception. That’s the church’s judgment. I accept it in my personal life,” [then Vice President Joe Biden] said during the 2012 vice presidential debate. “But I refuse to impose it on equally devout Christians and Muslims and Jews. I just refuse to impose that on others,” he said.

There’s been a bit of an uproar over far-right Rep Clyde’s (R-GA) behavior yesterday towards law enforcement:

That dynamic was on full display in the Capitol Wednesday as D.C. police officer Michael Fanone, who suffered a concussion and heart attack while fending off the Jan. 6 mob, visited the Hill seeking meetings with the 21 House Republicans who voted against a bill to award a Congressional Gold Medal to police officers for their service during the attack. Fanone says freshman Rep. Andrew Clyde — the Georgia Republican who recently downplayed the insurrection by comparing it to a ”normal tourist visit” — refused to shake his hand after the officer introduced himself in an elevator. [Politico]

This has led prominent Democratic Rep Swalwell (D-CA) to ask a question:

Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), one of the House’s impeachment managers during Trump’s second trial, was quick to seize on the interaction, tweeting “that to honor Trump, @housegop will dishonor the police.”

“It’s hard to accuse Democrats of defunding the police when you are dishonoring the police,” Swalwell said in an interview. “It makes me wonder: Was there prior support [in the GOP] for law enforcement? Or just phony political pandering? Because when the rubber meets the road, they’re choosing Trump over the cops.”

Beyond this and GOP refusal to recognize white supremacy as a real threat to the United States over the last couple of decades, there’s not really much evidence in support of an affirmative response. Why?

Because the Republican Party has been madly careening to the right over those years. There’s no doubt as to this contention; FiveThirtyEight even measured it a few years ago. If anything, we’re entering the terminal stage now with the rise to prominence of Representatives Gohmert, Gosar, Clyde, Greene, Boebert, Gaetz, and several others, just in the House.

Those they replaced, and their staffs, have often left the Party or do not participate in Party processes and policy formation as the abyss separating the one group from the other has yawned larger and larger.

The rightward inclination of the younger, newer members also means an inclination towards violence and away from democracy; this puts them at odds with the police, at least those members who are not already of their temperament. Add in the spice of contempt that so many of these “new Republicans” have, and it’s no surprise they do not support law enforcement.

But those Republicans they replaced? I tend to think they did support law enforcement, perhaps strongly in many cases. But not today’s Republicans. The police are now on the front lines, opposing their ambitions. They may try to charm the police, as they did in the previous election, but I think it’s becoming clear that the police must find support elsewhere.

Hey, boys! Some Grecian mariners in, errr, blue!

And that, of course, is a problem. This may be another iteration of the two monsters of old Greek myth, Scylla and Charybdis, a deeply suspicious Democratic Party on one side and a hostile Republican Party on the other, that will come together to grind and reform or destroy the police. We’ve been seeing this in the reports of broken morale, early retirements, and extended medical leaves at various police departments in the wake of the George Floyd murder-inspired protests, and the concurrent riots; I phrase it that way because, while the protests are more or less peaceful, outside of Portland, OR, and the ideology homogenuous among the protesters, again with an exception in Portland, the rioters have been a mixed bag, with the FBI seeking at least one far-right instigator who encouraged the rioting by the black community.

The results of the this Grecian crushing of law enforcement is in the hands of law enforcement, really: will they assent to reformation in hopes of retaining a position of prestige in the community, or will they stubbornly cling to old ways and loyalties? The recent sudden resignation of the local police union president here in the Twin Cities might suggest they’re taking the constructive former option, as President Krull (I kid you not) was definitely of the old order.

Rep Swalwell’s question may have been more significant than he realizes.

Athleisure:

a style of clothing that is comfortable and suitable for doing sports, but also fashionable and attractive enough to wear for other activities:
The singer has her own athleisure brand of clothing. [Cambridge Dictionary]

Totally new to me. Noted in “Why Does Everyone Talk Like They’re In A Cult?,” Amanda Montell, Refinery29:

But New Age–speak can also be a red flag. In some contexts, nebulous terms like “alignment” and “awakening” serve as scammy marketing buzzwords that have no clear or specific meaning, but simply paint a portrait of the speaker as transcendently wise, like some kind of all-knowing wiseman or prophet (even if they themselves don’t quite know what they’re saying). In competitive workplace environments, for example, excessive New Age lingo — constant talk of “missional synergy” and “holistic idea-sharing” — can promote a culture of conformity, discouraging individualism and questioning, while obscuring the fact that behind all the gobbledygook, the company’s higher-ups might not have the most “holistic” intentions (a recent Bond University study found that one in five CEOs is a clinical psychopath). And on social media, where influencers are no longer selling just athleisure and eye cream, but also their very souls, dime-a-dozen Insta-gurus like @activationvibration offer free nuggets of spiritual-ese, hoping followers will get suckered into paying for their self-actualization courses or retreats in order to learn what the hell they’re actually talking about.

Perhaps a trifle Germanic?

The ACA, aka Obamacare, has survived the latest challenge at SCOTUS:

The Supreme Court dismissed a challenge to the Affordable Care Act on Thursday in a decision that will leave the law intact and save health care coverage for millions of Americans. The justices turned away a challenge from Republican-led states and the former Trump administration, which urged the justices to block the entire law.[CNN/Politics]

I thought this was interesting …

The justices said that the challengers of the 2010 law did not have the legal right to bring the case. …

The justices noted that there is no harm to opponents from the provisions that they are challenging because Congress has reduced the penalty for failing to buy health insurance to zero.

… because later CNN’s expert commented:

“Today’s ruling is, indeed, another reprieve for the Affordable Care Act — one that rests on the extent to which the provisions its critics say are objectionable are no longer enforceable against them,” said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas Law.

The ruling means that the justices won’t rule on the merits of the lawsuit, but allows the law to stand.

“By holding that these individual plaintiffs and states lacked ‘standing’ to sue, the justices avoided deciding whether the ACA as revised is constitutional — but also made it much harder for anyone to get that issue into the courts going forward,” Vladeck said. “In essence, they sucked the oxygen out of the ACA’s continuing constitutional fire.”

So if Congress reinstates the penalty, doesn’t that give the complainants standing?

A 7-2 victory does tend to put the stamp of approval on the ACA, even if Justice Alito is feeling bitter:

In his dissent, Alito called out the various times the Supreme Court has now ruled on the law and found ways to keep it in place.

“Today’s decision is the third installment in our epic Affordable Care Act trilogy, and it follows the same pattern as installments one and two. In all three episodes, with the Affordable Care Act facing a serious threat, the Court has pulled off an improbable rescue,” Alito wrote.

“No one can fail to be impressed by the lengths to which this Court has been willing to go to defend the ACA against all threats. A penalty is a tax. The United States is a State. And 18 States who bear costly burdens under the ACA cannot even get a foot in the door to raise a constitutional challenge,” the veteran conservative justice added.

“So a tax that does not tax is allowed to stand and support one of the biggest Government programs in our Nation’s history. Fans of judicial inventiveness will applaud once again, he added. “But I must respectfully dissent.”

And I remain interested in the apparent fact that Adam Smith, the father of the free market, remains uncited by the opposition. I must find time to read his The Wealth of Nations someday.

Max Boot’s link leads nowhere, so I’ll quote him quoting the late Senator John McCain (R-AZ):

Russia benefits from a cold war if that means it gets treated as the equal of the world’s sole superpower rather than, as John McCain put it, “a gas station masquerading as a country.”

The upcoming transition away from fossil fuels may end up being a devastating blow to Russia.

A month and more ago, law professors Jonathan Gould, Kenneth Shepsle and Matthew Stephenson presented an idea for a way around filibustering by Senators representing a minority of the population of the United States – they call it democratizing the filibuster:

The filibuster exists only because a Senate rule requires the support of a three-fifths majority to cut off debate and hold a final vote. The Senate could change this rule so that ending debate would instead require the support of a majority of senators who collectively represent a majority of the U.S. population, with each senator considered to represent half of his or her state’s residents. This rule, which should be extended to all legislation as well as confirmation of judicial appointments, would allow a bare majority of senators to overcome a filibuster — if those senators together represented a majority of the American people. [WaPo]

It’s one of those ideas with a certain appeal to those who like complexity, but I think it ignores one big problem: The Senate was explicitly designed to provide equal representation to each State.

The problem may appear to be population representation, but it’s really the fact that filibustering exists.

It’s a carnivore dressed like an herbivore. Or maybe just an herb. Kill! Kill! Kill!

The Men Who Stare At Goats (2009) is the tale of US Army research into psychic warfare. Told through the eyes of reporter Bob Wilton, reports that the Soviets are working hard in the same sphere, true or not, inspires the Army, or more accurately a few senior officers, to open a research base dedicated to the topic in the 1970s.

Thirty years later, Lyn Cassady, an alumni of the original Army program, is rumbling through the Iraqi desert, looking for something, when Wilton, who learned Cassady’s name earlier, stumbles across him. Between IEDs and firefights in Iraqi towns, they finally find their way to a forward base run by another colleague from the psychic warfare days, Larry Hooper. He’s the man who takes the Army entirely too seriously, ready to use the psychic abilities – if they exist – of those trained for advanced warfare against any enemy who might pop up.

And they’ve proved psychic warfare’s utility with goats, a precursor to … goat stew.

The plot is much like Wilton and Cassady’s exploration of the desert, as it’s never quite clear where we’re going next, nor whether this is really a drama with comedic undertones, or a comedy with a twisted sense to it. It’s interesting, but exactly what it’s trying to say is more in the mind of the audience than the moviemakers.

They’re just hoping to read your’s.