Monthly Archives: January 2022

Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! (2015):

Political Celebrities In Movie!

Citizens Ignoring Other Cities’ Disasters!

Pigs In Space!

Sharks In Space!

Definitely: Watch at your own peril.

Certain to cause some outrage:

Critical theory should be treated more like creationism in public schools than scholarship: an unfalsifiable form of religion, preferably banned outright, but if not, always accompanied by Darwin. – Andrew Sullivan, The Weekly Dish (paywall)

Of course, then you’d have to prove that it’s unfalsifiable, and then teach why that’s bad. I’m not sure the first point is yet established, but so far this is an interesting start.

We mustn’t be seen together, whoever you are!

Agatha Christie’s 11 day disappearance in 1926 may never be publicly resolved as to its true nature, but it does offer one thing: a gap in the famed murder mystery writer’s life into which speculation may descend, and that is the basis of Agatha And The Truth Of Murder (2018). The author, distraught over her husband’s repeated requests for a divorce, takes on a murder mystery brought to her by a fan: the brutal murder of Florence Nightingale Shore, the goddaughter of Florence Nightingale, to whom the fan, Mabel Rogers, was a companion.

A real life murder, this story is less about the resolution of the murder itself, and more about how the process of solving the murder brings more maturity to Christie. From a better perspective on life and how other people’s lives are lived, and the importance of misleading appearances, to the salience of apparently trivial loose ends, what may have been an emotional breakdown becomes a pivot for Christie to take the next step on her extraordinary life’s journey.

There’s nothing weighty or amazing in this story, but there’s no denying that it is fun, with competent acting and story-telling. You’ll enjoy it if you give it a chance – and like murder mysteries.

Kurt Andersen has an interesting article in The Atlantic on ritual sacrifice, and how the right’s resistance to vaccination equates to various societies’ use of ritual sacrifice (of people) to solidify ruling structures. While noting the prominent role that belief in the supernatural, formal or informal, plays in ritual sacrifice, more importantly he notes the real goal:

A long-standing theory of human sacrifice, the “social-control hypothesis,” has argued that social elites used it to keep the hoi polloi subservient. But the evidence was scattered and anecdotal, untested by the most rigorous modern scholarship. One big question: What distinguished the cultures that practiced human sacrifice from those that did not? Thanks to a massive historical database of the social and genetic particulars of a hundred traditional societies spread over a sixth of the planet, from the eastern Pacific to Australia and East Asia, in 2016 we got one definitive answer: “Ritual human sacrifice,” an official summary of the research said, “played a central role in helping those at the top of the social hierarchy maintain power over those at the bottom.”

The entire article is worth your time, but I’m not sure if it’s entirely relevant. For example, I don’t know how to work in the role of It’s all a hoax!, especially from those who are on their deathbeds, and still cry our Hoax! It feels like a loose end.

But I enjoyed the article, as I know little about ritual sacrifice.

Erick Erickson sent out an email blast this morning entitled Will Republicans Blow It? It’s meant to entice recipients to subscribe, as it’s a teaser and a link to his radio show segment on the question, but what little he did write dovetails with my expectations:

I have a well-founded fear that I probably share with a lot of you. If history is the best indicator of future events, this fear may soon materialize. The fear is Republicans blowing it in November.

Sure, Democrats are in a bad spot. Inflation is surging and Biden can’t get anything accomplished. But in order for Republicans to have a chance at taking back both chambers, they need to nominate quality candidates who can win. We’re not seeing quality candidates in an alarming amount of races.

Nevermind the mischaracterization that Biden can’t accomplish anything, as that’s a running line in Republican propaganda with no connection to reality. The real point here is the lack of quality Republican candidates. As I’m a working dude, I can’t go out and evaluate candidates, so I’ll take Erickson’s more experienced view as good information, contingent on other views.

And, as long-time readers will know, this isn’t a surprising development. The Republicans who are, or were, quality people, who took governance seriously, have either left the Party, or have gone into hiding. Many are now independents or are even forming groups dedicated to defeating the Republicans.

Meanwhile, the outliers, the folks who cling to far-right positions such as sovereign citizens, the Democrats are communists, free market absolutism, all regulation is evil, corporate profits are more important than the environment, it’s the End Times, I’m a Prophet and God told me to run, etc.^[1], are streaming into the Republican Party. Not just because they’re hungry for power, although that’s certainly true.

But because they can.

Nobody is kicking them out of the Party. The folks who enforced standards, such as the importance of rationality over bigotry, are gone.

Thirty years ago, candidates for the Senate might have included people with degrees in government, perhaps diplomats with extensive foreign or military experience. These days? Football star Herschel Walker, who is literally mentally ill, is considered the leading Republican candidate for the Senate seat that will be decided this November, now held by Senator Warnock (D-GA). Or consider Senator Tuberville (R-AL), a former college football coach with no experience in government.

This is the best they can do? Yes, the Republican Party is truly going down the tubes in the clutches of amateurs who spit upon experts and don’t understand the job doesn’t end when the general election is won.

And the sad part is the Democrats, through their hubris on various issues, may end up losing in November. If Biden doesn’t announce a nominee for Justice Breyer’s soon to be vacated seat before the term is over and Breyer rides off into the sunset, we may see another SCOTUS seat occupied by yet another third-rate Republican legal personality. I think I’ll barf if I have to see Senator McConnell (R-KY) preen once again over his dishonor.

¹ I do not include the anti-vaxxers as there is significant resistance to vaccination all over the political spectrum.

Much to the relief of many Democrats, 83 year old Justice Stephen Breyer has announced his retirement at the end of the current term. While some folks are trying to put an excessive spin on this, such as Erick Erickson’s interpreting this to mean the Democrats are in big trouble – and not that he’s an old man who’s decided it’s time to move on – I am wondering how the Republicans plan to react to this.

I mean, the Democratic reactions to Kavanaugh and Barrett were fairly hot, even chaotic. Will the Republicans do the same?

In a word, they shouldn’t. I’m not saying they won’t, as a lot of conservative wannabe leaders will see this as a chance to stir up trouble and look like, if only in their minds, leaders. But if the Republican leadership is smart – yeah, I shook my head, too – they’ll keep everyone calm.

Why? Because it’ll impress the independents that the Republicans are the grownups in the room. It won’t be true, of course, as Senators McConnell (R-KY) and Grassley (R-IA) have been dribbling lies about when nominees can be confirmed for years now. But most independent voters won’t be aware of that, while the near-riots and protests and the drama during the confirmation hearings of Kavanaugh and Barrett were loud and, frankly, embarrassing.

The Democrats and the left like to think they’re the adults in the room, and, given the quality of the conservatives these days, they have a point. But their public behaviors have not proven the point; in many independents’ eyes, they’ve been reprehensible. This is where the left falls down: they think everybody’s political.

They’re not. Back in my youth, most everyone wanted to work and then go to bowling league. These days, I’m not sure about the bowling, but having a political discussion hasn’t replaced bowling. A lot of people don’t pay attention to politics, so it’s only the loudest things they remember when they’re forced to think about it – and the Democrats have been both loud and frantic.

If the Republicans are smart, they’ll play that up, because they can’t stop a nominee from being confirmed through brute force. They might stop it by raising valid points about the nominee, if the Democrats are still taking their role in government seriously, but otherwise this is only an opportunity to patch up a Party reputation that has taken some serious damage over the last twenty-five and more years, as they’ve showcased a whole lot of substandard politicians, such as Gingrich, Trump, McConnell, Grassley, Gaetz, Palin, oh this list gets too long so I’ll stop right here.

It’ll be interesting to see how this goes.

Tara Palmeri reports the former President thinks he needs more than one ticket in the endorsement game:

THE DOUBLE DIPPER — DONALD TRUMP has floated the idea of doling out dual endorsements in some of the key midterm races as he becomes increasingly suspicious of his advisers who are pushing competing candidates.

The GOP kingmaker-in-chief has grown so distrustful of all the advice he’s getting from various aides — and so wary of being lured into picking the wrong horse — that he’s floated an idea that would essentially dilute his endorsement.

“He feels like he’s being penned in,” said a person close to the former president, explaining that Trump’s logic is that dual endorsements would mean, “I get two chances to win.”

Another source of Trump’s endorsement apprehension: He isn’t clear about which advisers have significant personal or financial ties to the candidates they’re bending his ear about.

“He’s at times suspicious of the recommendations that people give him when he knows they’re being paid,” an adviser to the former president added. “He’s been asking who is paying who.” [Politico]

“I get two chances to win”? While I’m no statistician – one class in college, thanks for the ‘C’, professor – I do recall that only works with independent outcomes. A primary is not filled with independent outcomes. Because there are a limited number of votes available, the performance of each outcome, i.e., candidate, is inversely related to the performance of the others in aggregate in “first past the post” elections^[1].

Which means, as many have already pointed out, that there is a chance, a good chance, that the MAGA vote will split if Trump chooses to endorse multiple candidates. If this happens, then the winner may be damaged goods, not because of their far-right credentials, but because the factionalism in Republican politics has, so far, been quite bitter. MAGA voters decide that if their personal favorite candidate didn’t win the primary, well, they’re not going out to vote.

They may even think the vote was rigged.

Not that this is going to happen. The fallaciousness of Trump’s claim to have two tickets to the lottery, rather than one, is obvious, and I’m sure someone will inform him quickly as to how this all works.

But it’s a consequence of the rank amateurism inherent in Trump and MAGA. He doesn’t get it. That very amateurism may end up blunting the entire movement, disappointing them and driving the base away. It all becomes self-reinforcing. Ironically, he does understand that he’s at the center of corruption, because he wonders who is getting paid off. This is evidence of the way he views the world – it’s all about the money.

Think of it this way, Donald. Your influence is sharply limited. Diluting it just makes it that much less effective.

¹ The equivalent statement in ranked choice voting scenarios is considerably more involved, and I won’t take a stab at it.

I’ve mentioned Trofin Lysenko a time or two on this blog, most recently here, but now Skeptical Inquirer’s David Robert Grimes has published a lovely article on this walking disaster of a scientist that I really enjoyed:

Lysenko’s 1928 announcement of a new way to hugely increase crop yield, dubbed “vernalization,” was music to the Party’s ears. Inspiring stories of ingenious workers solving practical problems by wits alone were a trope of Soviet propaganda, so this agronomist from peasant origins without any formal scientific training outsmarting a bourgeois scientific establishment was widely embraced. Bestowed with political and scientific awards, he was elevated up the Party hierarchy. Such praise was premature; Lysenko’s lack of scientific training translated into poorly controlled, subpar experiments. Nor was he above bolstering his heroic image with fabricated data.

Still, Lysenko was an unimpeachable Party darling, and the audacity of his claims increased steadily. He insisted that the offspring of seeds treated with his process would inherit wondrous properties, allowing wheat to transmute into barley. This caused consternation to biologists, as it pivoted on Lamarckian evolution. This obsolete theory suggested acquired characteristics of an organism could be passed down to descendants, so a plant plucked of leaves might have leafless offspring. Biologist Julian Huxley pithily observed that “if this theory is correct, it would follow that all Jewish boys would be born without foreskins.”

Bold mine.

And where did it all lead? Not well for his critics:

As World War II consumed Europe, Lysenko began purging scientists who contradicted his grandiose claims. Arrested on overblown charges, his mentor and early champion Vavilov ultimately died in prison from malnutrition. In 1941, Germany attacked Russia, putting Lysenko’s crusade temporarily on ice. At the war’s end in 1945, Lysenko still held dictatorial sway with the Party—but closer evaluations of his work by others began to reveal unjustified and blatantly falsified claims. Apprehensive of his position, Lysenko implored Stalin for support, promising to increase the country’s wheat yield tenfold. Despite ample evidence this was impossible and Lysenko incompetent, Stalin bowed to this much-vaunted genius of the proletariat, bestowing the entire political machinery of the Soviet Union on Lysenko.

But after Sakharov unloaded on him, as I mentioned previously, the Soviet Union dismissed him to dishonor and obscurity, and began clawing its way out of the feverish swamplands of quackery and ideological allegiances into which his ideology had led them:

The state press, which had once heralded his genius, now damned him absolutely. Lysenko retreated into obscurity, dying quietly in 1974. His cult of personality had stifled advances in genetics, biology, and medicine across the Soviet Union. His peaceful end was a stark contrast to that of the scientists whose destruction he had authored in his violent purges. The Lysenko affair was, in the words of scientist Geoffrey Beale, “The most extraordinary, tragic and in some ways absurd, scientific battle that there has ever been.”

And I fear this is what we’re seeing again, only a lot closer to my porch, as the folks who are characterized as anti-vax, or anti-science, might be better considered as alt-world people. They’ve had a taste of cultural power and, if only imagined, social superiority, and damned if they’re going to let a pandemic knock them out of their seats of power. It’s a hoax, medicines pushed by their leaders are effective, the vaccines don’t work or are morally flawed or will kill them. We’ve seen people die of Covid, whispering with their last breath that it is all a hoax, that if only the doctors gave them the real medicine, they’d get better instantly.

It’s all of a piece with the rejection of experts, as advocated by former Speaker Ryan (R-WI), isn’t it? He told the conservative base they could figure out anything, they didn’t need experts, and when an overwhelming problem descended upon them, they sought a magic cure, because that’s what they wanted and Ryan told them they could find it. And then out come the vultures who prey on such people, the latest appearing to be, in an imperfect analogy to Lysenko, the highly credentialed Dr. Robert Malone:

Timothy Caulfield, the Canada research chair in health law and policy at the University of Alberta, said Malone injecting himself into a conversation with the kind of credentials he has, and “cherry-picking rotten data,” was “a worst-case scenario.”

“You have this individual who has all these credentials and this history in the biomedical world, so that looks impressive. And he’s referencing a study that, on the face of it, may look impressive. But you don’t know that the study is fraudulent,” Caulfield said, adding that Malone has “weaponized bad research.”

In November, Malone shared a deceptive video to his Twitter followers that falsely linked athlete deaths to coronavirus shots. The video suggested that coronavirus vaccination killed Jake West, a 17-year-old Indiana high school football player who died of sudden cardiac arrest. But the vaccine played no role in West’s death. The teen died of an undiagnosed heart condition in 2013. [WaPo]

But when Malone says

“Regarding the genetic covid vaccines, the science is settled,” he said in a 15-minute speech that referenced the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy. “They are not working.”

It’s red meat for a base hungry for victory over those annoying liberals, and finding Covid doesn’t obey their wishes, their prayers, their earnest demands, not of themselves, not from the movement leaders, such as Trump or Copeland, they’re looking for confirmation of their alt-world fantasy.

The Soviet Union died, in part, from motivated reasoning: where the tires met the road, their technology and social management miserably came up as third-rate. Will the far-right conservatives, such as Trump and Speaker Ryan, who put their narcissism and ideological priorities, respectively, over the opinions of the best trained people available, suffer a similar fate?

And how much damage will their fatally flawed machine do before it’s finally abandoned?

From CoinMarketCap:

What appears to be a 50% loss in value in Bitcoin. And it’s not recovering as the stock market corrects, surprising some financial professionals:

Wishcycling:

Wishcycling is putting something in the recycling bin and hoping it will be recycled, even if there is little evidence to confirm this assumption.

Hope is central to wishcycling. People may not be sure the system works, but they choose to believe that if they recycle an object, it will become a new product rather than being buried in a landfill, burned or dumped. [“Do you wishcycle? If so, you’re actually not helping to recycle.“, Jessica Heiges and Kate O’Neill, WaPo]

And onwards to unintended consequences:

By the way, I’m back from vacation and trying to recover. Insert interjection of your choice here.

WaPo decided to take another look at that phenomenon of being secular and found someone who seems to think they’ve found a flaw:

Satisfying my passive interest in dinosaurs is this:

More here on NewScientist.

Dialetheism:

It feels like common sense to say that all statements must be true or false. Aristotle called it “the most certain of principles”. But is it? Some philosophers hold the radical view that statements can be both true and false, which is called dialetheism. This view is gaining traction among logicians because of the way it can help with paradoxes.

What are we to make of this strange idea? One big problem for dialetheism is that it allows direct contradictions to exist and this leads to a well-known difficulty in logic called the problem of explosion. If it is fine to say it is raining and not raining, then our entire basis for belief and action blows up. [“A new way to solve paradoxes can help you think more clearly,” Professor Margaret Cuonzo, NewScientist (8 January 2022, paywall)]

The Shepherd’s Life, by James Rebanks, chronicles the lives of three generations of shepherds in the north of England, their days of caring for the flocks of the fell. But just as important as the flocks is the impact of the outside world on this way of life.

Perhaps most interesting to me was the subordination of profit to the importance of passing on values and protecting what is really valued. It’s not held up as some sort of panacea or idyll, as he recognizes its flaws and almost inevitable consequences, but the refusal to worship at the idol of profit in preference to defending a way of running society implies a recognition that tomorrow’s excess penny doesn’t pay for that which is destroyed by its sale. Would that such a mentality existed in the bankers’ world.

While I found the structure a trifle repetitive, I always find a peek into another world enjoyable as well as instructive, and this is very well done.

Recommended.

Out in the political world, it seems everyone has their misperceptions. For example, the Democrats seem unconscious of the damage their botch of the handling the transgender issue has, and continues, to do them. In fact, misperception is the topic of Erick Erickson’s post today, which is both important for both sides, and ironic since he had the balls to write this piece of complete bullshit:

It would also be silly for the GOP to put in office a man who’d be no younger than Joe Biden is now. The GOP has a remarkable bench with deep experience. Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Doug Ducey, Kristi Noem, Ron DeSantis, and Mike Pence all have tremendous experience and all are younger than either President Trump or President Biden. Regardless of what you think about any of them individually, it would be a bit nuts to give up a potential eight years for any one of them for no more than four years for a second Trump term.

With the possible exception of Governor Ducey (R-AZ), who carries around the anchor of having ignored President Trump in his hour of fellatio and thus is probably a lost cause when it comes to capturing the GOP nomination in 2024 – although Erickson would argue differently – ask any one of them about their list of accomplishments and it’s very short, undistinguished, and, in many cases, items will be presented as an accomplishment when they’re blunders. This is especially true of Noem and DeSantis, who bore keen responsibility during the pandemic and did not cover themselves in glory.

And, I might add, this is a repeat of the 2016 Presidential nomination run, where the exact same phrase was deployed, and that huge field of 16 or more candidates was wiped out by then-candidate Trump, a political amateur who then proceeded to blunder away his victory in the general election with bad rhetoric and no follow-through. Erickson, et al, frantically repeating “remarkable bench” doesn’t make it so, just as it didn’t eight years ago. The fact of the matter is that then and now the field was a pack of ineffectual ideologues from the Senate, feel good amateurs from the business world, and incompetents from governors’ chairs, all with no accomplishments to speak of.

I think it’s a bit early, but I suspect in two years we’ll start seeing business leaders stepping into the race and rattling the cages of Rubio, Cruz, and whoever else is in the race, and, if they’re wise, asking what accomplishments to which they can point. The list will be embarrassingly short.

And Haley, perhaps the most accomplished of the lot, will come in fourth.

The explosions are merely metaphorical expositions of the heartburn caused by the artificial coffee.

Free Guy (2021) is a mild-mannered exploration of a topic that’s long interested me: what happens when “artificial intelligence” actually becomes self-aware – and self-interested? In this case, it’s a video game in which the human players interact with each other as well as the NPCs – non-player characters who form the background to the city in which all exist. An artificial intelligence feature permits the NPCs to interact more realistically with the human players.

But then Blue Shirt Guy begins questioning why he does the same thing every day. And then he gets a hold of a pair of glasses that lets him see what the human players are seeing.

Mind blown. And he does seem to have one.

And then he stumbles across a human player who happens to have a grudge against the provider of the game, because she helped write the artificial intelligence and feels it was stolen. But she has to prove it’s present in the game, and she’s searching for it. Guy swirls about in her wake, learning, trying to help.

And being an instantiation of her goal.

It’s all a bit silly, but undeniably fun as well. While it doesn’t have any great insights, it does raise the most important question of all: does an artificial intelligence have any sort of right to existence?

Too bad the potential for a completely exotic “reality” is wasted here, but the real point of this movie is to make money, not explore one of the more outre questions potentially facing humanity. Have a laugh.

Those plates appear to be shifting, which can only be a good thing for the folks involved, legitimately or not. Andrew Sullivan has a summary (paywall):

An unusual thing happened in the conversation about transgender identity in America this week. The New York Times conceded that there is, indeed, a debate among medical professionals, transgender people, gays and lesbians and others about medical intervention for pre-pubescent minors who have gender dysphoria. The story pulled some factual punches, but any mildly-fair airing of this debate in the US MSM is a breakthrough of a kind.

Here’s the truth that the NYT was finally forced to acknowledge: “Clinicians are divided” over the role of mental health counseling before making irreversible changes to a child’s body. Among those who are urging more counseling and caution for kids are ground-breaking transgender surgeons. This very public divide was first aired by Abigail Shrier a few months ago on Bari’s Substack, of course, where a trans pioneer in sex-change surgery opined: “It is my considered opinion that due to some of the … I’ll call it just ‘sloppy,’ sloppy healthcare work, that we’re going to have more young adults who will regret having gone through this process.” Oof.

Sullivan has been one of many charged with being a ‘bigot’ by those who, consciously or not, chose to bypass having any debate over the entire issue, an abrogation of our moral, if not legal, obligation under the tenets of liberal democracy, to which we aspire if not attain; other names include Richard Dawkins, PhD, and J. K. Rowling, author; I believe Margaret Atwood has been similarly branded.

I’ve noted before this abrogation and its possible political consequences for the left & the Democrats, proved out in the Virginia gubernatorial election, and I once again call upon them to repair the abrogation, as mentioned above, in whatever way seems practical; without such efforts, the left’s chances of success in the future remain dicey, at best.

I’ll be ignored again, as I have no profile in this area.

But it’s worth briefly meditating on the practical consequences of debate. Debate is often seen as a rhetorical war between two sides, but it’s actually quite a bit more. A debate, conducted informally yet rigorously, can lead to new insights. As information, generally accepted as fact, is clarified, validated or rejected, and emerges from the gauntlet of the thoughtful, new intellects consider these facts, and where the old intellects may have settled comfortably into their trenches, to fight their perceived enemies, the new intellects almost inevitably will perceive new connections, false and self-serving narratives, and other significant configurations of knowledge and misperception, and come to clarified conclusions that are more convincing than those of the previous generation of intellects.

And, by so doing, improve the situation of those directly involved in the subject under debate.

When the “advocates” of the transgendered scream “bigot” at Dawkins, et al, they are not supporting the transgender, past and future. They’ve quashed debate, they’ve stoppered better knowledge and conclusions, they’ve, through their frantic need to do the simplest and wrongest, subjected the honest questioner to hatred and loathing. I shan’t take it further, as it’s unwarranted, and I suspect many of these haters are themselves victims of a concerted campaign to induce self-loathing, a campaign of which I don’t know the details, but have only seen hints. But it’s worth understanding that these supposed supporters are those that are endangering the transgenders, past, present, and future, and need to reconsider their brutal, primitive tactics that are not part of being a member of a liberal democracy.

Why, yes, my forehead is three times the size of my jaw. Does this … bother you?

Broil (2020) tries to dance the tightrope of story information: not enough? Too much?

Not enough, too often.

The Sinclair family is physically superior to the ordinary run of humanity, and immensely wealthy, controlling an entire industry, and its thirst for more, both in the world and in the family, is unslaked: power, control … blood. Patriarch August Sinclair is the king on his throne, hated for his ways, loved for his power, and his lust for the game of power is unreserved. His and his family’s aura is an ancient power that reaches far, far back in time. The Sinclairs are unstoppable.

And it’s time to celebrate, for it’s harvest time, and a special celebration is to be served up, because Chance and Luck, the young daughters of dissatisfied June and December, may be welcomed into the secrets of the family. August has heard of someone, called the Chef, who seems to be a power unto himself. A mere pizza cook who knows all combinations of flavors, he’s a little shocked at being recruited into the Sinclair kitchen.

And a lot more when handed poison and asked to use it on August.

Is he willing to take the risks involved in taking out his employer, when the employer is nearly invincible? What is this refuge Chance finds, and who’s already there? Why is Chef, at the end of his days, counting down from ten?

And just who granted Chef an extension?

That last question links to the lack of information mentioned earlier. This isn’t a twisted murder mystery, because there’s absolutely no way to guess the occult powers behind the maneuvering, much less their motivations. For the audience, this is less a mystery and more throwing audio and visual bombs at the audience for them to absorb, between puzzling interludes that make little sense, except in the aftermath.

Combine this flaw with the mistake of pulling metaphorical rabbits out of hats each time a plot hole needs plugging, and the story becomes a little less enchanting, and it’s too bad. The early puzzlement and anticipation was quite delicious, as was the impatience of Chance with August’s ancient sensibilities, but when it turns out there’s no perfectly reasonable explanation, within the parameters established early in the story, for later developments, then it becomes a bit disappointing: the audience doesn’t get to feel either clever at their insight, or overwhelmed with the storytellers’ moxie, but rather simply overrun with unstructured magic.

Close your eyes and don’t see the hole in the keel.

All that said, it is a fun ride, and if you can ignore the storytelling mistakes, or even if you can’t, you may enjoy this one. It can be an enjoyable challenge.

But don’t mess with August, unless you have some truly impressive backing.

Between cryptocurrencies and something called web3, the unexpected consequences may be enormously expensive. Noah Smith first explains web3 on noahopinion:

In recent months, there has been a lot of excitement around the idea of a new World Wide Web based on blockchains. It’s commonly referred to as “web3”, to be contrasted with “web1” (websites) and “web2” (social media platforms). The creators of Ethereum have been pushing this idea for a while, but the recent success of NFTs as an asset market has gotten lots of people excited that web3 is really happening.

There’s still the question of what web3 will actually do. This isn’t actually as important a question as you might think; when people started building websites in the 90s, no one really knew what the Web might ultimately be useful for. Sometimes humanity gets a cool new toy, and playing around and seeing what it’s useful for is more important than sitting around and theorizing about it.

And then he opines on where it might lead:

Imagine if everything you do online required you to decide whether to make a tiny payment. Send an email? Pay a few cents. Read one more paragraph of an article? Pay a few cents. And so on.

It would be an utter nightmare. The psychic cost of having to decide whether to pay a tiny amount for a tiny piece of product, dozens or hundreds of times a day, would be enormous. Some people would just choose not to deal with the hassle, and instead to simply use a ton of paid services and see their bill at the end of the month, like they do when using electricity in their house; but this carefree attitude would naturally lead them to buy far more than they really wanted, and when they saw a few of those monthly bills, they would reconsider.

In the end, most of these users would likely migrate back to either free ad-supported services or to subscription services that only make you think about payments once in a while.

Followed by

This is why the people trying to build web3 should probably steer away from making it just “micropayments, but in crypto”. I know this might sound crazy, but having to pay for stuff is not a feature. I am going to go ahead and predict that the added allure of being able to pay for things in a form of money that (nominally) isn’t controlled by the Federal Reserve will not be enough to make micropayments succeed where before they have failed.

My initial response is that It depends on whether you’re a producer or a consumer, now doesn’t it? But soon enough, the introduction of payment for every last little thing may even rebound negatively on the producers.

Let’s take the topic of opinion writing. While folks involved in the practice of opinion writing must, oddly enough, eat just like everyone else, and maybe have some expensive dreams in mind, this is not a transactional occupation. Opinion writers don’t just write pieces without regard to their past nor their future; rather, a producer of opinion writing who is an honest part of American society is trying to influence society to what they perceive to be its betterment. This is served by conveying an extended story to the audience, and neither is particularly well served by charging for it, because if the audience can’t afford it, or doesn’t want to pay for it, the author has failed.

And if the entire future is centered around micropayments?

There will be certain cases in which micropayments via crypto may make sense – but it’ll be interesting to see if they outweigh the disadvantages that come with crypto.

And the saga continues. Read Smith’s piece, I had not heard of web3 before and it may point to the future. A future that we may not want.

Curse Of The Black Widow (1977) is a typical example of the 1977 TV movie genre: bad cinematography, dubious story, unfocused characters, and dated, dated, dated. Despite the unexpected twist at the end, which was probably not necessary, this dull example of the 1970s movie making is just not worth your time.

Or my time.

But our cat Peeper did seem fascinated.

After the disappointment of certain dead people not showing up in Dallas for the gratification of the QAnon cult, here comes a new announcement:

Some of [QAnon leader in Dallas Michael] Protzman’s supporters have also spotted that Trump’s official announcement mentions “live entertainment” as part of the [Arizona] rally, and suggested that this will involve a band made up entirely of dead musicians and singers, including Michael Jackson, Prince, Whitney Houston, Janis Joplin, Tupac, and John Lennon. [VICE]

I suspect the former President knows how important it is to keep the troops entertained, especially when they can so easily walk away unharvested, so the solution is obvious:

Provide a band made up of impersonators. That way, you can have Elvis lead the singing.

Today’s blast near Tonga:

WATCH: Satellite imagery shows shockwave as Tonga's Hunga volcano erupts, causing tsunami pic.twitter.com/4r2gBFmAqE

— BNO News (@BNONews) January 15, 2022

“Who dies next? I’ve got a fiver on myself.” Priests never did learn how to bet.

Mutant Chronicles (2008), it turns out, is based on a video game, and that explains the dystopian scenario: the world is controlled by four warring corporations (remember the old board game RISK?), which accidentally break a seal during a corporate war that had been restraining an ancient evil. It specializes in converting the sick, injured, and the dead into multi-use zombies.

Sort of a recycling program.

So everyone who can find a ticket onto the spaceships is evacuating Earth, while the leftovers will have to fend for themselves, or join up for that last, suicidal mission to Hell.

Yeah, sounds like a video game.

What sort of saves this movie is the acting and the script, who and which manages to wrench some credible emotion out of a scenario that doesn’t really lend itself to emotion. The script digs around and finds some sad situations that actually feel authentic, mostly involving children, and the characters make it work.

Which is not to say you need to rush right to your favorite movie source to see this. It’s gritty, quite violent, a little silly, and there’s too many throw away characters. But the visuals are generally spectacular, even if Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t agree – maybe it looked worse on the big screen – there’s an actual plot, and if the ending is somewhat ambiguous, what the hey – it’s all in a good corporate cause.

Right?

While the transmission of fake electoral materials by fantasizing half-wits in Arizona and other States is a serious business, this addendum made me laugh:

It’s worth noting that while Arizona’s forged materials originally looked a little different, we learned yesterday that there were actually two different sets of Republicans that created fake documents in the Grand Canyon State — both of which were sent to the National Archives as if they were real — and while one was unique, the other matched the materials in Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, and Georgia. [Maddowblog]

Competing criminals? Trying to reinforce their point?

Tripping over their own feet?

It’s just emblematic, even if it’s a false perception on my part, of the basic incompetency of the right. The left has its own problems, but right now what passes for conservatives seem to have a problem with their best foot.

It’s a fairly awful foot.