Monthly Archives: July 2021

I find this report in NewScientist (3 July 2021) disturbing:

But last week, on 19 June, an international vessel-tracking system appeared to show HMS Defender and the Royal Netherlands Navy’s HNLMS Evertsen travel across the Black Sea to sail within a few kilometres of a Russian naval base at Sevastopol.

This would have been a provocative act, but the voyage never actually happened – both ships remained docked at Odessa, Ukraine, as confirmed by a live web cam feed. The tracking readings seem to have been faked, in a possible cyberattack.

The readings in question come from the Automatic Identification System (AIS), which is required on all ships by international law. It transmits position data from the vessels’ GPS along with an ID and other details at regular intervals. But GPS can be fooled by a transmitter imitating a GPS satellite and sending false information, which would in turn result in incorrect AIS tracks.

Sure, the title of the post is a bit of black humor, since military forces are forever looking for a step up on adversaries. But, at least in this article, the perpetrator – or bug – has not been identified, so we don’t really know if this is a military intrusion, or some agent of chaos trying to mess with the world for their own purposes.

All of which leaves us … where? To some extent, I’m in a black mood because of this Andrew Sullivan podcast, which basically suggests that we’re finished. Sullivan does tend to be emotional and forgets that not everyone has the information he has, so when psyops are deployed by the far-right, some folks will be mislead. And the podcast is from last December; how he reacted to the January 6 insurrection should be interesting.

But right at the moment, it seems like reality, like truth itself, is cracking up in the face of forces malicious.

Back when I first learned about vaccines, umpteen decades ago, we were taught that a vaccine immunized one from infection by a pathogen, and that was more or less full-stop, at least for us non-medical types.

Now we’re talking about breakthrough infections, which are the occurrence of an infection in a person fully vaccinated against Covid-19, and, well, this:

“When you hear about a breakthrough infection, that doesn’t necessarily mean the vaccine is failing,” [Dr. Anthony] Fauci said. “It’s still holding true [i.e., working], particularly with regard to protection against severe disease leading to hospitalization and deaths.” [WaPo]

That led me to muse on to how there are three domains to think about here:

1. Infection, where your cells are successfully invested by the pathogen.
2. Infectiousness, in which the pathogen is successfully using your cells to reproduce, mutate, and spread to its next victim.
3. Disease, which is the symptoms, from sniffle to death, that is experienced by the victim as a consequence of infection. [My thanks to Dr. Harriett Hall for the difference between infection and disease; I’ve lost the relevant link.]

Success is a spectrum word here, where success can range from just a little bit of success penetrating the cells targeted by the pathogen, all the way to optimal penetration and subversion of their function to the pathogen’s purposes. The ability to reproduce and infect another host seems to correlate, at least in Covid, with the success of the infection; so, it appears, does disease.

All of this leads to this useless bit of word play:

Vaccines lead to sickly infections.

Sure, go ahead. Wrap your mind around that one.

I hope it’s comfortable.

A headline from CNN/Politics:

Ex-Army Ranger weaponized military training to aid Capitol rioters, judge says

Which really makes one wonder.

Just a few pics from the last couple of weeks.

In case you were wondering, NBC News has a useful tidbit of news:

As of Tuesday, more than 560 people had been charged in connection with the [January 6th] riot [or insurrection].

That’s a lot of regretful people is my thought. The above article is in connection with the arrest of a probationary DEA “official,” who is the first Federal law enforcement member arrested.

Suspiration:

1. To breathe: “And from that one intake of fire / All creatures still warmly suspire” (Robert Frost).
2. To sigh. [The Free Dictionary]

Noted in this 9 Chickweed Lane cartoon.

Or at least Covid anti-vaxxers would like to believe. Brian Broome talks about them in WaPo:

I recently had the opportunity to hear a 95-year-old man speak on the subject of covid-19. When asked if he’d gotten the vaccine, he responded that he received it as soon as it was available. He went on to say that, in his long life, he has seen this behavior over and over again with regard to vaccines. He has lived through the people who were smarter than the measles vaccine and the mumps vaccine, smallpox, polio; there has always been a percentage of the population that refused them.

I am following the lead of the man who lived to be 95 years old. Not some dude from Daytona Beach with an Internet connection who believes that his immune system alone will storm the castle should covid’s time come. Daytona Beach dude does not want to be told what to do. None of us do.

There are those who refuse the vaccine simply because they do not like the current administration. This, I believe, to be little more than pouting, a child holding his breath in the grocery store as a protest for not getting a cookie before checkout.

Last week I had the pleasure of talking with a gentleman in Michigan in his eighties, presumably embedded in the Evangelical community (I didn’t ask, but context suggests it). He’d been fully vaccinated for Covid, he and his wife had spent time in the hospital recovering from Covid before the vaccination, and he had no time, no patience, for the anti-vaxxers. I don’t think he considers them to be adults.

And while Broome may be right about this:

I do not understand the unvaccinated. Is their fear that medical science is trying to poison half of the United States? Half the world? I guess it all comes down to trust. And yes, in the end, you can do with your own body whatever you please. But I cannot ignore how few cases of measles, smallpox, mumps and polio we deal with these days. I based my choice on that.

I have to wonder how much of this has to do with postmodernity, how much it’s people certain that they can yell or pray the virus into submission.

I mean, if you’re convinced that you have a personal relationship with God, well, how can you need a vaccine to survive.

This guy is taking a whack at explaining the 4th dimension. I’m not sure if he’s hitting it out of the park, or if he’s just whacked.

Jackson Lahmeyer (R-OK) is going to challenge Senator James Lankford (R-OK) in the Republican primary because Lankford, who was about to vote to challenge certain Electoral votes on January 6th, was interrupted by the January 6th insurrection, and upon return to the Senate chambers, chose not to continue his challenge, instead voting to accept.

Lahmeyer, as one might expect in today’s GOP, has vowed to chase delusions:

“Lahmeyer has made attacking the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election a centerpiece of his campaign, repeatedly vowing that if he is elected to Congress, he will make it his mission to hold those who supposedly stole the election from former President Donald Trump accountable for treason,” Right Wing Watch reports.

The conspiracy theory that Trump won the election is not the only delusion Lahmeyer has embraced.

“Lahmeyer has focused heavily on winning support from right-wing QAnon conspiracy theorists like Lin Wood and Michael Flynn, both of whom have endorsed his campaign. Lahmeyer has also been a regular participant at the ‘Restore America’ rallies organized by right-wing conspiracy theorist Clay Clark, where he has been proudly posting photos of himself hanging out with the various election, COVID-19, and QAnon conspiracy theorist speakers at such events.  [Raw Story]

This should make him popular with the GOP base and the QAnon crowd … right?

Republican Jackson Lahmeyer is denying some QAnon believers’ claims that he’s involved in “Child Sex Trafficking, pedophilia or devil worship” as he runs for U.S. Senate in Oklahoma. …

“Interestingly, Lahmeyer’s flirtations with QAnon have not prevented him from becoming the target of smears from QAnon conspiracy theorists who have reportedly accused him of pedophilia and child sex trafficking after he posted a photo of his young daughter wearing red shoes,” Right Wing Watch explained. “As QAnon conspiracy theorist Liz Crokin once explained, many QAnon believers are convinced that ‘there is symbolism for red shoes in the occult and it’s also tied to satanic ritualistic abuse and the trafficking of children.'”

While it’s amusing that a fantasist is becoming the victim of other fantasists, the important point is that this sort of attack pushes to the fore the real problem with postmodernists such as, well, the far-right in this example.

First, a moment to get a sense of the definition of postmodernity:

Postmodern philosophy is a philosophical movement that arose in the second half of the 20th century as a critical response to assumptions allegedly present in modernist philosophical ideas regarding culture, identity, history, or language that were developed during the 18th-century Enlightenment. Postmodernist thinkers developed concepts like difference, repetition, trace, and hyperreality to subvert “grand narratives“, univocity of being, and epistemic certainty. Postmodern philosophy questions the importance of power relationships, personalization, and discourse in the “construction” of truth and world views. Many postmodernists appear to deny that an objective reality exists, and appear to deny that there are objective moral values. [Wikipedia]

The key? The denial that an objective reality exists, or, more loosely, the denial that there is a truth to a matter that exists independent of the collective desires of some group. The frantic chanting of Stop the Steal! and related group slogans qualifies, even in the face of the difficulties of group epistemology, as postmodernism, the belief that if they yell it loud enough, it becomes true. This has ties to former President Trump’s prosperity church beginnings, as well as some descriptions I’ve seen of the woke political culture, and, well, the culture of five year olds.

Yes, five year olds.

The consequences? In previous decades, before postmodernism had taken over the GOP, Lahmeyer could have used some logic to turn back the baseless accusations, or required that proof be forthcoming, and pointed at lack of same as proof that he’s not a pedophiliac and trafficker. The accuser would have suffered reputational loss. But now, Lahmeyer’s as much the victim of baseless accusations as those he accuses of stealing the election from Trump, despite the utter lack of evidence and the best efforts of former President Trump and his band of desperate lawyers.

Thus the GOP will continue its descent into chaos. Even prominent elected officials, such as Senators Cruz, McConnell, Hawley, and Representatives McCarthy, Gaetz, and many more may find themselves smeared and then facing primary challenges, because at some point, some power-hungry extremist will consider them to be compromisers, weak, or even apostates for failing to join in some ridiculous stunt.

The question will then become: how much more will the independents, the holders of real political power, tolerate before they stop helping to elect Republicans to office? The only real brakes will come from failing to be elected. As an example, right-wing extremist Kris Kobach’s loss to Democrat Laura Kelly for the position of Governor of Kansas in 2018 marked him as an extremist failure; he did not make it out of the primary for the 2020 Senate race in Kansas, and in fact faced opposition from the Kansas Republican Party chairman. Kobach may be finished in politics.

The moral future of the GOP continues to look bleak, doesn’t it?

“Uh, I was teaching third grade last week.” Oh, good, then you’ll not need any training for this mission.

The Tomorrow War (2021) follows the travails of Dan Forester, former Army Special Forces member, husband, father, teacher – and draftee for a war happening thirty years in the future. A wormhole has been opened by the future humanity, a wormhole that permits limited time travel, as our descendants find themselves in a sudden death struggle with … well, did you ever see Alien (1979)? Yeah, basically mouths on wheels. With the addition of limbs that spit deadly darts, and absurdly reminded me of Pierson’s Puppeteers.

Present day draftees serve seven day terms, returning to present day Earth at the end of those seven days – if the monitors on their arms indicate they’re still living. Forester’s group is scheduled for a couple of weeks of training, and then the jump, but they get virtually no training as an emergency in the future calls them to early duty.

Or an early death. Does that make sense in the future? In any case, someone with a grudge against Miami Beach must have made this movie, because the latest group of draftees are dropped – literally – into a Miami Beach that’s a flaming wreck.

And still contains the seeds of an effective defense.

And who is waiting for Forester? Who is leading the research on the big, bad guys?

Who still loves Daddy?

As far as it goes, it’s a mundane little story – a trifle arbitrary, a bit awkward, and only compelling because of its pell-mell pace and the buddies Forester makes along the way. They have good chemistry.

But, back home with a solution but no delivery system, the future looks dark. Until a series of questions without answers, which I should have liked so much and didn’t, leads to a familial reconcilation. I mean, a ride out to an obscure landing spot.

I mean –

It seemed tacked on, to be honest. We need a happy ending! cried the movie executives, and one was cooked up. Oh, it has its cute aspects, and, technically, I suppose it makes some sense. But at some point, there are enough arbitrary fact drops and plot twists that it no longer feels organic.

If you like action, this is full of it. If you like a protagonist who is full of humility and understated humor, this is also not bad. But if you’re sensitive to manipulation, well, you’ll be manipulated by this one. It’s fun and exciting and you’ll forget about it soon after finishing it.

Long gone now, here are the front yard Virginia Bluebells:

From a Skeptical Inquirer obituary of former NewScientist editor Bernard Dixon:

In 2000, Dixon was appointed to the Order of the British Empire (OBE). He expressed delight but later told the British Library’s Oral History of British Science that he made it clear he would not accept the award from Prince Charles because of his ill-informed statements about the genetic modification of crops. Dixon opted instead to have the medal sent to him from the lord lieutenant of Greater London—through the post in a Jiffy bag.

I’ve said, a few times, that humans are adders, while computers are multipliers. But it appears that computer networks are mega-multipliers:

Researchers have found just 12 people are responsible for the bulk of the misleading claims and outright lies about COVID-19 vaccines that proliferate on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

“The ‘Disinformation Dozen’ produce 65% of the shares of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms,” said Imran Ahmed, chief executive officer of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which identified the accounts. …

These figures are well-known to both researchers and the social networks. They include anti-vaccine activists, alternative health entrepreneurs and physicians. Some of them run multiple accounts across the different platforms. They often promote “natural health.” Some even sell supplements and books.

Many of the messages about the COVID-19 vaccines being widely spread online mirror what’s been said in the past about other vaccines by peddlers of health misinformation. [NPR]

I suppose I shouldn’t be astounded, having been around social media networks since the 1980s, but I am. The reach of these twelve individuals is amazing, and speaks to the uneven understanding of the importance of public health procedures vs the desire of certain people to become wealthy, no matter what the cost might be for the public.

Not that all of these individuals are looking to become wealthy. The only one named in the article, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the son of the late Attorney General, appears to simply wish to help the public, but his poor understanding of vaccinology, combined with an astounding arrogance, results in abuse of social media.

This general urge has always been present, which may be a symptom of being a drama queen.

But my point remains: a very small number of people are endangering a relatively large number of people simply through the distribution of false information. And that’s made easy by the power of computer networks that do not accentuate provenance nor history nor, for that matter, credentials.

It’s just someone jawboning.

Nicholas Wallace, recent Stanford Law graduate, condemns The Federalist Society in Slate via a satiric flier celebrating their role in the January 6th insurrection:

My flyer itself emphasized the events immediately preceding the Jan. 6 attack: Hawley famously raised his fist in support of the mob that stormed the Capitol, while Paxton (along with John Eastman, who was at the time the head of a Federalist Society practice group) spoke with President Donald Trump at the now-infamous “Save America Rally.” But the Federalist Society’s connections to the insurrection stretch well beyond the day of the attack. Consider the October 2020 speaking tour of Hans von Spakovsky. Von Spakovsky was a member of the Trump administration’s “voter fraud” panel, from which he controversially suggested excluding Democrats and “mainstream” Republicans. For more than two decades, von Spakovsky has been at the forefront of the right wing’s “voter-suppression effort in disguise,” pushing unfounded claims of voter fraud as a justification for restrictions on the franchise. And in the month before the 2020 election he participated in at least nine Federalist Society events, delivering talks with names like “Consequences of Mail-In Ballots” and “Election Fraud 2020: Fact or Fiction?” At one of his talks, von Spakovsky warned: “If it’s a close election, we may have a lot of chaos in a lot of different places, and a lot of litigation contesting the outcome.” …

This farcical streak of court losses for Federalist Society officers did not deter other Federalist Society members from continuing to spread election misinformation. In late December, Hawley promised to object to the election results during the Electoral College certification process on Jan. 6. Ted Cruz, another member of the senate’s unofficial Federalist Society Caucus, followed suit.

All of which is to say that while “The Originalist Case for Inciting Insurrection” was indeed supposed to be funny, the Federalist Society’s connections to the attack on the Capitol are no joke. The collective efforts of the Federalist Society’s membership provided a veneer of legal legitimacy to the falsehoods that fueled the insurrectionist mob. Meanwhile, the Federalist Society itself has resolutely refused to disavow those members who played a role in inciting the insurrection.

So I’m a little puzzled by their behavior. Assuming they really are professional lawyers and not just autocratic wannabes, The Federalist Society is in a lose-lose situation.

If the Democrats continue in power, the role of the Society, supposing it continues to fail to condemn the insurrection and its Society-based progenitors, its reputation will become severely tainted. It’s even possible that those SCOTUS Justices who are members of the Society will resign their memberships.

And if the Republicans come into power again? They are tied to Trump through actions, aka the insurrection, and service, which would be the lists of judicial nominees they provided to the Trump Administration. And, if we do transition to an autocracy, this is the same as transitioning from the Rule of Law to the Rule of Man, as philosophers of government will put it.

That is, the position of lawyer will lose its utility and prestige.

Worse yet, in autocracies loyalty rarely runs in both directions, and Trump is no exception. The moment he or his heirs find the Society to be useless or worse, it’ll be consigned to the dustbin of history, both institutionally and for most of the individual members.

Disaster for all.

Homeoprophylaxis:

A system for treating disease based on the administration of minute doses of a drug that in massive amounts produces symptoms in healthy individuals similar to those of the disease itself. [The Free Dictionary]

Noted in “Napa doctor arrested for selling fake COVID-19 vaccines, immunization cards, DOJ says,” Liz Kreutz, Amanda del Castillo and Kayla Galloway, ABC7 News:

Juli A. Mazi, a licensed homeopathic doctor, allegedly sold homeoprophylaxis immunization pellets that she said contained COVID-19. She allegedly told the victims that the immunization would create an antibody reaction in the immune system.

Or just call it quackery and be done with it.

The Hill delivers the view of a former Republican state party chair:

The new agitators, all elected to their posts after Trump won the White House, are a reflection of the priorities of a Republican base that is interested more in fealty to the deposed president than in standard conservative doctrine.

“State party chairs are elected by the grassroots. They are not accountable to the elected officials, they are accountable to the grassroots, and if they don’t do what the grassroots want them to do, they won’t be chair for very long,” said Chris Vance, a former chairman of the Washington State Republican Party who became an independent shortly after Trump won election. “Today’s base of the Republican Party is, are you loyal to Trump? This activism of Trumpist state party chairs is driven by the same thing that’s driving the entire party.”

Given the tendency of non-Trumpist Republicans to leave an increasingly toxic Party, I think we can expect to see this trend to continue, a trend that will terminate only when the Republican Party ceases to have national relevance, or some facet of the former President is revealed that completely discredits him in the eyes of his base – if that’s even possible.

Perhaps the only such revelation would be that Trump is a debtor and not a billionaire, nothing more than a grifter. And I have no certainty even that would convince more than a sliver of the Trumpist base to desert, as Trump has trained the base to dismiss any unsettling facts as mere fake news.

So I expect the state GOP parties to simply become more toxic in most cases. More cases of toxicity are provided by Steve Benen here.

Perhaps she dissembles, or is avoiding some sexual predator, but here’s former President Trump’s lawyer Jenna Ellis:

Jenna Ellis said she’s done with the GOP because its members aren’t backing ex-President Donald Trump enough.

Trump’s former senior legal adviser announced she was leaving the Republican Party during a lengthy monologue on her Real America’s Voice show “Just The Truth” on Monday.

“The truth matters,” began Ellis, who as a member of the Trump legal team pushed the former president’s lies in trying to overturn the 2020 election.

Ellis, who once described Trump as an “idiot,” said Republicans had back-stabbed Trump. She also accused the Republican National Committee of “not championing the issues” that make America great.

“All of them, including Ronna McDaniel, should resign now,” declared Ellis, referring to the RNC chair. [HuffPost]

Dangle power in front of them and watch their ethics dissolve, I guess.

Phalanx:

The phalanx (Ancient Greek: φάλαγξ; plural phalanxes or phalanges, φάλαγγες, phalanges) was a rectangular mass military formation, usually composed entirely of heavy infantry armed with spears, pikes, sarissas, or similar pole weapons. The term is particularly used to describe the use of this formation in Ancient Greek warfare, although the ancient Greek writers used it to also describe any massed infantry formation, regardless of its equipment. Arrian uses the term in his Array against the Alans when he refers to his legions. In Greek texts, the phalanx may be deployed for battle, on the march, or even camped, thus describing the mass of infantry or cavalry that would deploy in line during battle. They marched forward as one entity. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “7 points Biden needs to make about voting rights,” Jennifer Rubin, WaPo:

Sixth, Biden should announce that in 2022 and 2024, the Justice Department will deploy a phalanx of voting monitors to prevent intimidation and attempts to falsify or overturn legitimate election results. It was a mistake for federal prosecutors not to investigate the efforts of Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) to pressure Georgia election officials to throw out ballots and former president Donald Trump’s efforts to demand they “find” new ballots. While Biden has pledged not to direct the Justice Department to undertake specific actions, he can publicly call for Congress and the department to clarify the law as needed and prevent such behavior in the future.

A popular metaphor.

Jennifer Rubin has a good rant some of the latest anti-abortion laws in Texas, where complaints are expected to be registered by citizens and not by law enforcement personnel:

Consider the potential for harassment, spying, extortion and other vengeful behavior directed toward women. The law depends on what a woman’s neighbors, associates and friends know about her reproductive health and are willing to tell the authorities to grab a $10,000 bounty. The possibility of frivolous litigation is hard to quantify.

Texas Republicans lack the nerve to uniformly enforce the law or to defend its constitutionality. Professor Steve Vladeck of the University of Texas tells me, “It’s a deeply cynical effort to both (1) chill conduct that ought to be constitutionally protected; and (2) provide cover for judges to find creative ways to dodge the merits of the constitutional challenge.” This is a law designed not to “protect life” (a farce, given that protecting innocent life has taken a back seat when covid-19 restrictions were at issue), but rather to create fear and uncertainty for women and health-care providers. Will miscarriages lead to a lawsuit from a nosy office worker seeking to cash in on the reward? Will abortion bounties become a weapon in divorce and custody cases? No one knows — and that is the point. The law seeks not to protect the fetus in any systematic way but rather to intimidate women, making them into cash cows for spiteful anti-choice busybodies. [WaPo]

Even more importantly, will employers take due note of this embarrassment and leave the state? How about high-skill personnel who realize that societal chaos isn’t a desirable characteristic of work or home environment?

People value predictability. What happens when that first fallacious suit is brought to court by the busybody who’s a little short on paying off their gambling debts? And everyone pays attention?

Add in a bit of climate change, and we may see the start of a mass migration, of companies and people, leaving the formerly great State of Texas.

And events no longer being held in Texas, as socially conscious companies decline to use Texas venues, or social justice groups pressure corporations to not use Texas.

There may be a lot more backlash to this anti-abortion law than Texas state legislators are anticipating.

Erick Erickson:

A great many of my friends have decided to give up classical liberalism in large part because they believe it lacks any teeth or fight to stop a progressive cultural onslaught. Frankly, much of both the left and right now live in fear and loathing of the other side.

Combined with all of that, we are now in post-modernity. In post-modernity, doubts outweigh truth; there is no objective truth; reality is shaped by words; and devotion to a belief necessitates performance. Post-modernity is arguably incompatible with an American experiment that holds to self-evident, objective truths.

Thus we get boisterous performance on the left and the right. The left engages in protest, cancel culture, and demands for censorship. The right engages in protest, cancel culture, and demands for censorship. The left claims the nation is systemically racist and fundamentally flaws with unfalsifiable statements. The right, from conservative thinktanks funded by the free market successes of what conservatism conserved, demands to know what conservatism has conserved.

Everyone wants to move on, largely devoid of ideas or truth, driven by contempt for the other side.

For all that I laugh – literally, sometimes – at Erickson, here he’s nailed it, in particular the final sentence. While Erickson continues onward to see this through the prism of his particular variety of Christianity, I see us as being in the age of intolerance and hubris.

By the plural, I mean much of the leadership of the left and right, and the tendency of swaths of each side to tromp along in their wake, tediously spouting similar slogans. I do not mean everyone.

But, regarding tolerance, those who understand the importance of recognizing the concept of fallibility and the credibility of compromise are largely segregated from the levers of power, particularly on the right – and it takes two to tango. So long as the right’s culture leads to right-wing extremists becoming leaders, such as Greene, Boebert, Gohmert, Gaetz, Jordan, McConnell, all the primary challengers to Cheney and the pro-impeachment Republicans, and all the primary challengers to sitting Republican governors, so long as the toxic team politics mixes with the Christian Nationalism portion of the party – see my favorite Senator Goldwater (R-AZ) quote – the power of that portion of the left leadership that acknowledges the difficulties of governing, and the importance of compromise, is vitiated.

And that leads to hubris, the divinity-level certainty that You Are Right And My Opponents Are Wrong And Evil. The right, in its embrace of the religions supposedly devoted to the Divine, bears a terrible burden in this regard, a burden so heavy that it’s breaking the Republican Party; the left, though, has displayed its own self-righteousness and rigidity, with some observers, such as Andrew Sullivan, pushing wokeness as emblematic of this failure.

Are we doomed? No.

On the right, far right extremist influence on the electorate continues to shrink. Moderate and Customary Republicans who can no longer stomach their former brethren in the wake of the January 6 Insurrection and the incompetence and frank insanity on exhibit are leaving the Party and/or the movement. Among Evangelicals, membership is shrinking and young people are not replacing those lost to age. And independents continue to shudder in revulsion.

But the left, too, has suffered setbacks. As an example, remember Defund the police!? In Minneapolis, right down the road from me, that effort collapsed. And it was not entirely a surprise – “Man on the street” interviews presaged it, as Minneapolis residents of all colors expressed unease, if not outright disagreement, with the slogan, as ill-defined as it has always been. Between that unease, a drop in manpower at MPD, and a discouraging jump in violent crime, the idea of defunding the police has become far less popular, until I suspect it’s the favorite slogan of only a few dedicated groups and power-seekers who don’t yet understand that defund is no longer popular. I remain in favor of reformation and removal of those responsibilities that do not normally require an armed response, as has been demonstrated with the CAHOOTS program of Eugene, OR.

So the rigid left, too, does not have a convincing message for the electorate.

The problems of left and right are disparate: the left may push recognition of problems difficult to deny, but their proposed solutions are unconvincing, even haughty; the right, populated as it is with third and fourth raters who benefit from a status quo that is unsustainable, are reduced to dishonest tactics, such spreading lies, gerrymandering, glibly discounting the prime importance of democracy, and shamelessly pushing voters to embrace the single-issue poisons of which they are so proud.

The question is: what can a skeptical public do about this? In the absence of wide spread ranked choice voting, in which moderates can harvest the secondary votes of zealots who – reluctantly – list the moderates as second choices, I’m not sure. Speak out, keep voting, vote against the zealots, demand demonstrated competency, distrust the slogans, be sensitive to manipulation (read The Persuaders, perhaps), ask yourself what’s missing from an argument, remember that common sense solutions is a big red flag when it comes to national problems, and, well, your most valuable political possession is that ballot. If you’re selling it to the candidate who says You should vote for me because of white shame! or I can do the anti-abortion jig better than anyone else! then you just might be screwing yourself and your fellow citizens.

And not doing the right thing.

This little guy visited us the other night.

I believe I brushed his corpse out the window yesterday. But a nice guy while he was around.

The old sovereign citizen argument, which I’ve been hearing as a legal defense since I was a kid, rears its legal and incoherent head:

A Pennsylvania woman who allegedly stormed the Capitol and told a police officer to “bring Nancy Pelosi out here now… we want to hang that fucking bitch” has filed court documents claiming to be a divinely empowered entity immune from laws.

Pauline Bauer, a Pennsylvania pizzeria owner, is accused of multiple counts of violent entry, disruptive conduct, and obstruction of Congress after she allegedly broke into the Capitol on Jan. 6. Prosecutors allege that Bauer tried organizing buses to transport people to D.C. for a rally that preceded the riot, and that while in the Capitol rotunda she told police that she wanted to kill House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

But in what experts describe as an inadvisable legal strategy, Bauer has demanded to represent herself in court, appeared to threaten a court clerk with prison time, and declared herself a “self-governed individual” with special legal privileges.

Bauer does not simply appear in court, she clarified during a June 11 proceeding via Zoom. “I am here by special divine appearance, a living soul,” she told a judge that day, while stating that she did not want an attorney. [The Daily Beast]

So if this pizzeria owner were to find her business had been burgled at some time, would she call the police, or would she do the cop thing herself? The article doesn’t say, but if her response is to call the cops, then the judge can add a charge of High Hypocrisy to the list.

But I have to admit to some faint feelings of amusement.

It’s only foreplay.

There may be invasive aliens fifty feet tall, but life in northern Mexico still needs to go on in Monsters (2010). Rich heiress Samantha Wyden is to be escorted by news photographer Andrew Kaulder through the “infected zone” and to her father, who happens to employ Kaulder. This is not the story of heroism and great monsters, though, but how the personal foibles of these two characters interact with the effects of fifty foot tall monsters on local society, from finding and funding mules to get them across the zone to indulging in the local sex trade.

But the themes of this movie become incoherent as monsters strips away the supporting characters, and as they cross the American border and find an abandoned town, the exact goal of the storytellers becomes difficult to decipher. Is this an allegory about the invalidity of xenophobia? Maybe – but it’s worth remembering xenophobia is not necessarily a bad thing. How about the grisliness of capitalism? Could be.

The acting and effects are good, but the characters are a bit dull and the story probably needed a rewrite.