Monthly Archives: November 2021

In our orbit there’s not just us and the Moon, but also the Apollo asteroids, including this one:

According to a new analysis, a chunk of rock that hangs out near Earth’s orbital path along the Sun seems to be made of the same material as the Moon, suggesting that it broke off at some point to be flung into space. But how, and when, remains a mystery.

The rock is named 469219 Kamoʻoalewa, and astronomers already found it interesting before this latest development.

The object belongs to a class of asteroids known as the Apollo asteroids, which more or less share Earth’s orbit around the Sun; but Kamoʻoalewa is also what is known as a quasi-satellite, staying near Earth over long periods and multiple orbits.

Kamoʻoalewa is small, just 46 to 58 meters or so in diameter (150 to 190 feet), and can only be seen in Earth’s sky for a few weeks every April. It wasn’t discovered until 2016, and learning more about it hasn’t been easy.

In this most recent effort to learn more, researchers made use of one of the most powerful telescopes on Earth, the Large Binocular Telescope at Mount Graham International Observatory. In 2017, they obtained observations that included the asteroid‘s spectrum – the distinct pattern generated by the way Kamoʻoalewa reflects light from the Sun. [ScienceAlert]

Maybe the coolest part, though, is the name:

It was named Kamoʻoalewa, a Hawaiian word that refers to an oscillating celestial object. [Wikipedia]

No pics, though.

Hippophagy:

1. the practice of eating horseflesh. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in Tasting Forbidden Flavors, Max Miller, somewhere around the 2:00 mark:

This time the nominee is an entire state Party:

The Wyoming Republican Party will no longer recognize Liz Cheney as a member of the GOP in its second formal rebuke for her criticism of former President Donald Trump.

The 31-29 vote Saturday in Buffalo, Wyoming, by the state party central committee followed votes by local GOP officials in about one-third of Wyoming’s 23 counties to no longer recognize Cheney as a Republican. [AP]

At the very least, it’s a condemnation of the Party for it to expect Cheney to be its personal thumb-puppet. But, at least to my mind, it’s a betrayal of the country for not realizing that, yes, Trump’s actions were impeachable offenses – as a number of Congressional GOP members recognized.

Spaceweather.com has an unsettling report on human activity messing with us all:

SPACE WEATHER AND THE RUSSIAN ASAT STRIKE: Russia just destroyed one of its own satellites. On Nov. 15, 2021, a missile launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome struck Kosmos 1408, shattering the old satellite into thousands of pieces. Debris came so close to the ISS that astronauts took shelter in their crew capsules, just in case they had to abandon ship.

Littering Earth orbit with debris is never a good idea. Space weather could make it much worse. To understand why, …

Go follow the link. Losing satellites means losing cheap communications, accurate weather forecasting such as incoming hurricanes, etc etc. Hurricanes that kill more than a thousand people are a big deal these days; back at the beginning of the 20th century, Galveston lost somewhere around ten thousand people to the 1900 storm, a magnitude more than today. If weather does become more violent as a result of anthropogenic climate change, then losing warnings means more people killed, as well as more damage, due to lack of preparation.

This is old and popular, but new to me, so you’re stuck with it.

CNN/Business has a report on the latest Alex Jones hijinks. Jones is a source that has been more than generous in the past – for hijinks:

Sandy Hook families suing InfoWars founder Alex Jones have won a case against him after a judge ruled against Jones who has failed to comply with the discovery process.

Jones and entities owned by him were found liable by default Monday in a defamation case against them.

Connecticut Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis cited the defendants’ “willful noncompliance” with the discovery process as her core reasoning behind the ruling. She specifically noted that they had not turned over financial and analytics data requested multiple times by the Sandy Hook family plaintiffs.”

All the defendants have failed to fully and fairly comply with their discovery obligations,” Bellis said at the virtual hearing.

It’s not difficult to imagine a correlation between analytics of content access and financial returns, is it? By connecting that information, Jones’ wretched rants concerning Sandy Hook will give the Court insight into just how much money is generated by such fallacious sensationalism.

And that all feeds into the basic tale of an adoration of wealth & prestige. It’s lead Jones to believe he should defy all lawful societal orders because, well, money.

Which really isn’t that far from former President Trump, former advisor Steve Bannon, former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows – The hell with the lawful, we refuse to give up what’s not ours!

A bunch of very dangerous five year olds. But that’s the culture of the right, and it’s dangerous.

In case you’re wondering if the mainstream media is getting stories right or not, Andrew Sullivan suggests – quite strong – that they’re not (The Weekly Dish, paywall):

Think of the other narratives the MSM pushed in recent years that have collapsed. They viciously defamed the Covington boys. They authoritatively told us that bounties had been placed on US soldiers in Afghanistan by Putin — and Trump’s denials only made them more certain. They told us that the lab-leak theory of Covid was a conspiracy theory with no evidence behind it at all. (The NYT actually had the story of the leak theory, by Donald McNeil, killed it, and then fired McNeil, their best Covid reporter, after some schoolgirls complained he wasn’t woke.) Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

The MSM took the ludicrous story of Jussie Smollett seriously because it fit their nutty “white supremacy” narrative. They told us that a woman was brutally gang-raped at UVA (invented), that the Pulse mass shooting was driven by homophobia (untrue) and that the Atlanta spa shooter was motivated by anti-Asian bias (no known evidence for that at all). For good measure, they followed up with story after story about white supremacists targeting Asian-Americans, in a new wave of “hate,” even as the assaults were disproportionately by African Americans and the mentally ill.

As Greenwald noted, the NYT “published an emotionally gut-wrenching but complete fiction that never had any evidence — that Officer Sicknick’s skull was savagely bashed in with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob until he died.” The media told us that an alleged transgender exposure in the Wi Spa in Los Angeles was an anti-trans hoax (also untrue). They told us that the emails recovered on Hunter Biden’s laptop were Russian disinformation. They did this just before an election and used that claim to stymie the story on social media. But they were not Russian disinformation. They were a valid if minor news story the media consciously kept from its audience for partisan purposes.

If indeed these are all true, the MSM has damaged itself badly in the name of seeing everything through the lens of white supremacy and anti-Fox News.

On Persuasion, Zaid Jilani comes to the same conclusion that I did concerning the Democratic left and the recent off-year election, only with far more authority:

While Americans watched Democrats ousted by Republicans all over the nation, another trend also became clear: across the country, the left wing of the Democratic party failed to displace the party establishment.

In Buffalo, New York, for instance, things initially looked pretty good for the left. Over the summer, Democratic socialist India Walton had managed to win a victory in the mayoral primary, besting a four-term incumbent mayor named Byron Brown. But Brown decided to continue through the general election even though his name wasn’t even on the ballot, asking his constituents to “write down Byron Brown.” Write-in victories are rare in American political history, and so it was easy to assume that Walton, who went on to earn the endorsement of both of the state’s U.S. Senators, had it in the bag.

But no, Brown won decisively – through emphasis on keeping traditional policing staff levels. Jilani goes on to talk about Minneapolis, just a few miles to my west:

But the bigger picture shows that the left repeatedly failed to win intraparty debates even on the fertile ground of progressive cities. I have some insight into why this might be, having reported on these intraparty debates for years.

I recall a reporting trip I made to Minneapolis in 2017, the year that Frey was first elected mayor. I embedded with a socialist named Ginger Jentzen, who was running on a third-party ticket against the Democratic Party for a city council seat. While this is electoral suicide in much of the United States, the city’s ranked-choice voting system and left-wing bent made her a viable candidate.

Jentzen was a seasoned organizer who had helped run the campaign that won a $15 minimum wage for the city. She had bold plans that included introducing rent control to Minneapolis. But as I went with her door-to-door canvassing, I noticed that she had trouble addressing some of the concerns that her potential constituents raised with issues like crime. When constituents would tell her they felt unsafe at times, she would try to steer the conversation back to some social or economic policy. She was clearly uncomfortable endorsing more policing as a response to public safety concerns. She ended up losing the race.

Leading to:

Yes, there are times when politicians compromise so much away that they barely change the status quo. But being unable to compromise on anything is just as politically sinful as being willing to compromise on everything. If the left wants to take power and influence policy, it needs to shed its ideological inflexibility in the face of elections.

I’d discard the phrase ideological inflexibility and use a phrase with a bit more sting: political immaturity, brought on by political hubris. The latter means certainty beyond justification, the mindset that you’re the group with The Truth. This is the basis of political immaturity, the lack of comprehension that American government is a team effort, and some of the members of the team may be at odds with you – but all agree that some problem needs a response, something has to change, and. as we all acknowledge, governing is hard.

Except the politically immature of all political stripes Don’t Get It. They’ve been in their epistemic bubble for too long and have forgotten certain universal truths, such as No, God Has Not Reached Down And Touched You With Perfection, or No, You’re Really Not As Bright As You Think.

It’s just how it is, but the politically immature don’t get it.

Look, there’s no doubt the Floyd murder indicates changes are called for. Did it indicate wholesale replacement in the middle of a crime wave that is killing men, women, and children? I don’t see it. The question that needs answering – and the left will claim they’ve already answered it, and so will the right – is whether the murder of Floyd is the fruit of the policing system, or the crime of an individual or a small conspiracy.

I fear the entire Defund the police effort, and its subsequent rejection, has drowned the project to reallocate responsibilities that most already recognize – including the police. I’m talking about moving police away from mental health incidents, as accomplished in Eugene, OR, via the CAHOOTS program. The We Know Best! approach to politics is both immature and damaging and needs to be discarded.

Of course, that diminishes the ego, and thus that won’t happen until a crisis that points at that bad attitude occurs. We may not survive such a crisis.

Ethogram:

You can think of an ethogram as a foreign-language dictionary for an entire species that covers actions as well as sounds. The concept dates back to the mid-20th century, when pioneering ethologists like Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz drew up the first ones for species whose behaviour they thought of as innate and stereotypical – mainly insects, birds and fish. Several now exist for the mouse, that staple of laboratory research. But intelligent, socially complex animals represent a much greater challenge, and you can count the number of ethograms that cover them on the fingers of one hand. For cetaceans, there is a book called The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins. For chimpanzees, says Whiten, the most comprehensive one is probably another book called Chimpanzee Behavior in the Wild. And now there is the Elephant Ethogram. [“Do you speak elephant? With this new dictionary you will,” Laura Spinney, NewScientist (6 November 2021, paywall)]

I hadn’t seen / heard this version:

Remember the conspiracy theory Birds Aren’t Real? They’re still around:

Dozens of people gathered outside Twitter Headquarters in San Francisco, California, on Wednesday under the banner of conspiracy theorist group Birds Aren’t Real. The group that believes that none of the birds in the USA is real because the govt has replaced them with surveillance drones, was demanding that the social media site change its logo that features a bird.

Ahead of the protest, the group had put up posters in the city announcing the same. The poster said that Bird’s Aren’r [sic] Real movement is going to hold a “protest demanding Twitter change their disgusting Bird Logo”. It said that every bird is a government surveillance drone and every use of “bird” imagery is intentional pro-bird social programming. The poster included the Twitter logo crossed out, to drive the point home. [OpIndia]

Maybe they can change their logo to be Cthulhu.

I wonder how many of these folks see themselves as unimportant or unessential and that drives them into weird systems like this one?

When your mummy’s head fossilizes?

The classic The Mummy (1959) endures for its connection to the primal animal which forms the core of each and every human.

No matter how much they wish to deny it.

Let’s take a deconstructed / reconstructed approach to this plot. Two or three thousand years ago, Princess Ananka of Egypt, on a trip to honor the god Karnak, dies of an illness. A high priest to Karnak, Kharis, will, for his love of Ananka, dare to sin a great sin and read from the Scroll of Life in an effort to revive the Princess. Caught in the act, Kharis becomes the bodyguard of Ananka … or whatever it’s called … sentenced to guard her mortal remains for eternity.

And then comes the middle stages of the archaeological uncovering of Egypt’s past, the mid-1950s in modern lingo, in which artifacts are valued not for the knowledge to which they hint so much as their physicality. They are prizes, to make short work of it. Three archaeologists, Stephen Banning, his son, John, and John’s uncle Joseph Wemple, have discovered the cave tomb of the Princess. John, laid up with a badly broken leg, can only absorb reports from their hired help. As Stephen and Joseph explore, Stephen happens to find the Scroll of Life, and, perusing it, goes mad.

Stark, raving bonkers.

Years later, Banning recovers his senses. The three men are in England now, and Banning warns them that he can tell that something is coming to avenge the desecration of the Princess’ tomb. Yes, it’s Kharis, who has been shipped to England by Karnak adherent Mehemet Bey, and soon enough Stephen Banning is dead, and the next night Uncle Joseph also cannot resist the clutching hands of the rag-clad guard, whose lack of life shields him from the weapons of today. And now it’ll be young John’s turn, isn’t it?

Yep.

But there’s one small detail: John’s wife, Isobel. Catching Kharis in the act of squeezing the life out of her husband, her mere appearance stops the avenging creature, and the mummy, confused by the appearance of a beautiful woman, loses focus to the rush of hormones and retreats.

Bey, unaware of the failure of Kharis, prepares to leave, but covers up his surprise admirably when John appears at his front door. But this leads to the next attack by Kharis, and he does appear to be unstoppable by conventional means.

But Isobel’s influence, while hardly unique, is an unconventional weapon, and soon we’re striding through the English swamps as Kharis’ primal need causes him to abandon his sacred duty, the third time his animal side has made him a disappointment to Karnak, and sweep Isobel up as a prize. She escapes him through sheer force of will, and he ends up falling over and sinking into the swamp, presumably lost forever.

The pace of this story is not as quick-footed as today’s popular stories, and requires a bit of patience, yet there is a strange satisfaction to it. Given the usual granting of a miracle or two to the plot, the story hangs together rather well, and there’s little feeling that new supernatural powers and creatures are being summoned to stuff into the plot holes. Instead, there’s a certain logic to the whole thing that’s really quite believable.

And that’s what makes this thing work. That, and the excellent acting and sets. While I shan’t recommend it, if you’re in the mood for an old-fashioned monster movie, this certainly fills the bill.

So pleasant:

I’ve been trying to ignore Erick Erickson’s post today, but it’s title, Gaslighting America, just screams … projection. Why? Let’s take a look:

Repeatedly, the Biden Administration has claimed wages are going up. This too is gaslighting. Wages have barely increased and inflation has far outpaced wages. Therefore, the purchasing power of each dollar now buys less than what a dollar bought just six months ago. It amounts to a wage cut.

Or does it? What if prices go down? Look, there are several components to prices, from the cost of inputs, including labor costs, to the effects of competition, right up to sheer greed. So let’s take labor costs: they’re going up at the moment, and it’s anyone’s guess if they’re coming back down. If they don’t then prices will have one supporting factor.

But another factor are supply chains, and those are currently in a shambles. This shambles means supply prices, whether food or components or whathaveyou, is at a premium. This causes price rises, but as those shambles are resolved, and as demand settles down – remember Kevin Drum’s chart at right? – supply prices should settle downwards.

Wages are up. Those can be permanent. Prices may go up, but they also may go down. I consider Erickson’s claims specious, especially an unquoted remark of his using the adjective skyrocketed. No, I grew up in the Carter years, when prices really jumped. I’m am not prepared to consider our 5-6% annual inflation to be a SpaceX rocket.

The Biden Administration is also gaslighting us on fuel prices. The official line is that oil is a global market and there is little the President can do. Take out even last year during the pandemic when no one traveled. Two years ago, fuel prices were lower.

Progressives in the Biden Administration have willfully worked to make fuel costs higher. Until it hit their polling, Democrats openly said fuel prices needed to be higher to reduce demand for fossil fuels. The Biden Administration cancelled pipeline plans, canceled exploration leases on federal land, and drove up regulatory costs for petroleum producers. These policies have contributed to the fuel scarcity. When Trump was President, the United States was a net exporter of energy. Now we are left begging OPEC to produce more.

And. So. What? Pipelines and oil fields are not built in a day or a year. To make this specious claim is to play with emotions, not deduce from facts. And maybe, just maybe, you want those “regulatory costs” a little higher. Hiding behind that bland little phrase are two facts: the quasi-religious Republican tenet that Regulation is bad, and the fact that regulation, properly implemented, safeguards life, both existentially and quality-wise.

So prices are a little higher. Snopes, of all sources, has an interesting quote I found in regards to the claim Did Biden Set US ‘Back 50 Years’ on Energy Independence Progress? made by Turning Point:

The Turning Point meme disregards entirely the existence of the year 2020. The omission of 2020 masks not only a decline in U.S. fossil fuel production that occurred, it also conceals a larger truth about U.S. presidents and the global energy market: Neither they nor their policies have a significant effect on the market compared to other global factors.

Remember how the price of oil jumped around prior to the pandemic? It was generally blamed on investors, but it’s also caused by transit costs, threats of war costs, and other factors. While I tend to think that Presidents have more influence than is suggested by Snopes, the club they wield isn’t known for its nuance, and must be handled with care.

So if Snopes suggests Trump had little to do with energy production, while Erickson wants to nastily imply that he did, without actually quite saying it, what is to be made of this?

Crude oil production did grow significantly during Obama’s presidency — up 77 percent — but experts, including the federal government’s Energy Information Administration, have said the growth is largely due to technological advances, such as fracking and horizontal drilling. [FactCheck.org]

I immediately noticed Erickson omitted this important fact when lamenting the price of oil, as if Trump alone were responsible – but, if Trump claims accolades, then on the same basis so does Obama. (Who did try.)

And if one doesn’t get any, neither does the other. Erickson’s claim and omission are painfully hypocritical.

Which is all quite sad because I think there’s something to consider here:

At this point, Democrats seem almost willfully trying to lose the 2022 midterm elections. After the Virginia elections, Democrats doubled down accusing voters of racism. Voters in Virginia elected the first black Lt. Governor for the state and first Hispanic Attorney General. But the talking heads in the press said it was just further proof of racism while still denying critical theory is a thing.

I don’t know if the racism claims occurred. Maybe they did. He provides no link. But I’m finding the entire school issue to be highly confusing. Some writers claim it doesn’t exist. Some claim it does. I don’t respect everyone, but some are worth the respecting and those stories are conflicting. The Democrats had better learn from the Virginia loss for 2022.

Or they will lose.

Some folks are finding this encouraging:

Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming says that many fellow Republicans are “privately” thanking her for standing up to former President Donald Trump as she runs for reelection in 2022.

Cheney, one of the most well-known and vocal members of a small group of GOP lawmakers and leaders opposed to the former president, is one of only two Republicans serving on a special committee organized by House Democrats to investigate Trump’s role in inciting the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol by right-wing extremists.

“It’s a real reflection of the times in which we live that privately and behind the scenes, there are many Republicans who say, ‘Thank you for what you’re doing. We wish we could be more public,’” Cheney told Fox News on Tuesday. “People who understand that what the former president is saying is dangerous, is not true, and who know that our party’s got to be a party based on truth, that we can’t embrace the lie.” [Fox News]

But to me it’s a little odd and makes me wonder if this is indicative of a general mysteriousness in the culture of the Republican Party. Who else cannot name their supporters?

Donald J. Trump.

The former President was infamous for his anonymous validators, as Steve Benen called them, supposedly high-seniority Democrats and business leaders who’d call up Trump and cheer him on, but he couldn’t name them for obvious reasons.

And it’s hard to see a substantive difference between Rep Cheney and the former President here. Each claims support from groups that supposedly hate them. Indeed, Cheney’s lost her leadership position in the House GOP, and that would be because of them, while the President lost his position, although not so directly, because of the Democrats and the business leaders.

It’s not all that hard to extend this observation to the mystical side of the Republicans: the Divine presence, supposedly endorsing the President and his adherents, is a notoriously difficult entity to interview or even get a straight word from on current events; your best bet are proxies who are of either very dubious reputation, or appear to be self-delusional (your pick here). But the choice of believing the mystical, as much as there’s a lot of pressure on the base to believe the former President, remains with the base; if the claimant sweats it, fumbles the words, or is caught fondling the wrong person, the base may choose to disbelieve the claim.

That is actually an attractive alternative for people who don’t want to take the word of experts, who want desperately to assert their own competence to make this choice. There are, after all, no real experts. It makes for an inviting business.

Whether Cheney is good enough in the earnest claim business remains to be seen.

I can’t help but be struck how it appears the GOP is running down the slide to self-destruction:

But what’s striking about all of this is what constitutes outrage among GOP lawmakers. Wyoming’s Liz Cheney denounced anti-election lies, so Republicans kicked her out of the party’s leadership. Illinois’ Adam Kinzinger joined a bipartisan investigation into the Jan. 6 attack, and he became persona non grata in his party. Thirteen members voted for a bipartisan infrastructure package, and now there’s talk of partisan retaliation against them, too.

In the meantime, those same House Republicans who demand consequences for perceived transgressions have a whole lot less to say about Arizona’s Paul Gosar, Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, Colorado’s Lauren Boebert, and other far-right members who actually deserve to be seen as scandalous extremists.

This isn’t a situation in which GOP members refuse to go against one of their own because of partisan loyalty. On the contrary, House Republicans are only too pleased to turn on their ostensible allies in response to ideological heresies that are considered unforgivable. [Steve Benen]

Outrage by the far-right extremists? Check. Punishing transgressions? Check. Whittling down the Party? Check. Cries for revenge?

The thirteen who voted for it surely voted on the policy, but on the strategy they gave the Democrats a win and a talking point. Ron Klain got to go on television and make the case the Democrats absorbed Tuesday night’s results and responded by passing the infrastructure plan to show they got the message. [Erick Erickson]

Check.

Parties contemptuous of compromise and dissent, that attitude being a signpost of the power hungry and politically immature, I think inevitably decline and fall as the variances in opinion on the difficult subjects of governance and reelection come to the fore – or those attitudes and members are ejected from the party.

I’ve been saying it for years: One day the GOP will consist of three members, and two will be on probation. Those seventeen that voted from the infrastructure bill can be considered to be on probation. The Democrats have their own problems, but so long as they stay away from the organizational model of the Republicans, they have a chance to reform their Party and stop giving the electorate reasons to vote for the Republicans.

Can they do it? I don’t know.

I see Erick Erickson is complaining about about what he views as the predictable: an “orthodox” Montana pastor who makes some income on the side as a realtor has been caught in a squeeze play in which the realtor association, to which he must, practically speaking, belong, has banned ‘hate speech’ – such as condemning homosexual behavior.

Which this pastor does.

So Erickson manages to wind up with this:

The real world implications here are pretty significant. If the left insists people give up their worldview to participate in the private sector, the right is going to destroy the private sector. The left will be just fine with that. But it won’t end well for anyone. If we cannot all mutually tolerate each other’s views, we cannot remain united States. Together, the illiberal left and right will burn it all down.

The National Association of Realtors knew pastors and people of faith could be targeted by their hate speech code. A lot of public discussion revolved around that at the time they enacted it. But the association proceeded anyway and now, as so many predicted, Christians are being targeted for punishment by the wokes. It was all foreseeable, predictable, and they did it anyway because more and more trade associations have embraced Woke-O Haram.

And, having read this, all I can think is Welcome to the other foot. Existential hatred of homosexuals was, and is, the stock-in-trade for many “orthodox” Christian churches throughout much of the 20th century and earlier. Keep them out of the military, out of the public square, chase them out of the private square.

Call them pedophiles and Satan worshippers and what have you. Engender murderous hatred where possible.

It’s just the other fungus-afflicted foot now, isn’t it?

But it’s worth noting this: while most homosexuals will tell you they have no choice about being homosexual, this pastor certainly has a choice. How do we know this?

Because interpretations of the Bible change over time. We already know they change from sect to sect, but we also know this because, in most locations, suggesting we have a good ol’ fashioned witch-burning would be met with understandable and civilized horror. But we know we used to kill them – or, more importantly, those so accused – such were the Salem Witch Trials, eh?

So what Erickson is inadvertently highlighting is an ongoing change in Biblical interpretations. It’s been going on for decades, because social change only occasionally happens instantaneously; even today, if you look hard enough, you can find a few Bible literalists who, honest to the end, cry out Death to witches, rather than appreciating that general Biblical practice no longer tolerates blood lust in that regard.

Whether or not the realtor association should be taking this position is something of an open question in my mind, although I am inclined to say yes, but remain open to argument. I also tend to see this as Erickson trying desperately to keep his conservative base together through the use of infuriating epithets and refusing to consider the entire situation.

But that’s a rant for another day.

Nutrigerontology:

Nutrigerontology is defined as the scientific discipline that studies the impact of nutrients, foods, macronutrient ratios, and diets on lifespan, ageing process, and age-related diseases. Its goal is to investigate compounds, foods, and diets that can reduce the risk of ageing-related diseases and increase the healthy lifespan, achieving successful ageing and longevity. [BioMed Central]

Noted in “Want to add healthy years to your life? Here’s what new longevity research says.” Matt Fuchs, WaPo:

I’ve been watching CNN headlines over the last couple of weeks, and, up until a couple of days ago – basically, the passing of the bi-partisan infrastructure bill – they pronounced doom and gloom about the state of the Biden agenda, the Democratic Party, and a future of terrible inflation.

And then that all stopped.

When I stopped to think about it at all, it seemed to me that this was just politics as usual for the Democrats: a robust discussion of various views of governance, goals, and funding.

But not for CNN.

Jennifer Rubin has been beating on the mainstream media for its poor coverage of politics, and had another blast at it today:

Weighing in on the alleged economic recovery is Kevin Drum:

Retail sales are so strong that they’ve not only made up the decline from the pandemic, they’ve made up the decline from the entire housing bubble. We may be “missing” 5 or 9 or 10 million workers, and supply chain problems may be restricting the supply of goods, but that sure hasn’t stopped consumers from buying stuff.

Indeed. Perhaps consumers are sucking so hard on the straw that it’s collapsing.

Maybe that’s an unfortunate analogy.

Via AL-Monitor:

When the recipe says, Beat the eggs, poorly.

I’m not saying what sort of clue.

Professor Richardson has a snarky remark about Governor-elect Youngkin’s (R-VA) victory in Virginia:

In Virginia, governor-elect Glenn Youngkin’s 17-year-old son tried twice to vote despite being too young. This was unfortunate because his father had emphasized “election integrity” in his campaign, announcing that he would create an “Election Integrity Task Force” that would work “to ensure free and fair elections in Virginia.”

Her source is WaPo:

The 17-year-old son of Virginia Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin (R) tried to cast a ballot in Tuesday’s gubernatorial election twice despite being too young to vote, Fairfax County officials said in a statement released Friday.

If Mr. Youngkin is smart, he’ll turn this into lemonade through some sort of public punishment, or endorsement thereof, for his son. Indeed, this may even be a setup, a manufactured opportunity to show his public rectitude. It’s not the opening shot in a re-election campaign, as Virginia bans consecutive terms as governor, but perhaps Youngkin has higher office ambitions. This would make an important contribution, if managed properly.

If that comes out, I think we can predict Youngkin either running in 2024 for President, or for one of the two Virginia Senatorial seats.

Long-time readers may remember the software, some call it malware, created and distributed by NSO Group of Israel, which broke into phones, given a little help, aka phishing, by the phone’s owner. This was in 2016; now that it’s 2021, it appears the American response has been updated, as WaPo reports:

The United States on Wednesday added the Israeli spyware company NSO Group to its “entity list,” a federal blacklist prohibiting the company from receiving American technologies, after determining that its phone-hacking tools had been used by foreign governments to “maliciously target” government officials, activists, journalists, academics and embassy workers around the world.

The move is a significant sanction against a company spotlighted in July in an investigation by the global Pegasus Project consortium, which includes The Washington Post and 16 other news organizations worldwide. The consortium published dozens of articles detailing how NSO customers had misused its powerful spyware, Pegasus.

The move could also raise tensions between the United States and Israel, where NSO is a prized technological powerhouse. Exports of NSO’s software are regulated by Israel’s Ministry of Defense, which must approve them as it would any weapons sale.

That last paragraph leaves me to wonder if the United States has misjudged the situation – or if Israel’s MoD has a problem, either of corruption or not in alignment with general liberal democracy goals.

If Israel or NSO cannot find a way to take them off the list, NSO may gradually disintegrate:

The entity list designation prohibits export from the United States to NSO of any type of hardware or software, severing the company from a vital source of technology. It could also hinder future business arrangements and challenge the firm’s ability to work as an international company.

“The impact is broader than just the legal prohibition,” said Kevin Wolf, an international trade lawyer at the Akin Gump law firm who previously ran the entity list process. “It’s a huge red flag.”

Not that America is the only source of innovation, both in hardware and software – but Americans are a very significant source. If NSO is cut off from an important input source, the people who do the work may leave for greener pastures.

Death by a thousand cuts.