Monthly Archives: February 2022

You want to do what with my step-daughter?

At the center of The Red House (1947) lies the disasters caused by unrequited love. And requited love. Maybe just love. The little town that serves as the backdrop of this story may seem idyllic, but just because 12th graders Nath and TIbby seem like a sure thing doesn’t mean they are, for high-school drop out, but attractive, Teller has caught Tibby’s eye and helped write on her secret t-shirt Manipulative Bitch, as my Arts Editor observed. Teller has certain rights to the small forest owned by the Morgans, and there his secret love lives, which would be … himself.

But Nath is at the center of unrequited love as well. His father long gone, his mother has been playing with the affections of a high school sweetheart, and is last seen going thataway with him, leaving Nath to work for the Morgans, Pete, his sister Ellen, and their adopted daughter Meg.

Meg, who is developing a fancy for Nath. Ellen, who has a finger in the game in the character of the town’s Doctor Byrne, who scuttles hither and yon and occasionally sees Ellen, thus inflaming the old spinster’s passions all the more.

And Pete? His leg, long lost in an accident, still yearns after a woman who disappeared in the forest long ago, but now his heart is set on … Meg, his adopted daughter. Squirm if you must. It’s the right thing to do.

Especially as Pete’s vision of being in love is quite territorial.

None of this is going to turn out well. Maybe Nath’s mother does OK, but the rest are having a hard time, between familial duties keeping them from pursuing their happiness, to an all too frenzied pursuit of, well, their own happiness, leading to a police pursuit and an unhappy ending.

Still, Nath is brave when it counts, even when the red house is screaming at him and let’s not mention the time he hid in the Morgan’s barn, yeah?

Full of anxiety and suspense, The Red House isn’t quite compelling, but it’s a pleasant little descent into psychosis that you may very well enjoy.

Have fun, and leave some breadcrumbs to follow.

Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) makes her pitch – literally:

One day after former President Donald Trump endorsed one of her Republican primary challengers, South Carolina U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace stood outside Trump Tower in New York City to make her case.

In a video posted to Twitter Thursday morning, Mace defended her political credibility, touted her ties to Trump and questioned Republican Katie Arrington’s ability to deliver for Republicans, even after Arrington secured Trump’s endorsement.

“If you want to lose this seat once again in a midterm election cycle to Democrats, then my opponent is more than qualified to do just that,” Mace said in her video, looking straight into the camera as the 68-story glass skyscraper that is also home to the Trump Organization loomed behind her.

Here’s that video:

I’m standing in front of Trump Tower with a message this morning…#SC01 #LowcountryFirst pic.twitter.com/CpmMYA63qt

— Nancy Mace (@NancyMace) February 10, 2022

And all this despite claiming, with regard to the January 6th Insurrection, “I hold him accountable for the events that transpired.” It says something about her judgment and morals, and none of that story is good. Yet another tale of the flexibility of morals when it comes to power.

Yep, that’s gotta be a fantasy. No one wears facial hair like that!

The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty (1947) presents Mr. W. Mitty, a man smitten with his own dreams, and perhaps not his mother, her friends, and his fiancee. An ominous beginning.

But his job as a copy-editor and ‘idea man’ at a publisher of story magazines isn’t so bad. Usually. And then his life brightens considerably when a corpse pops up and then disappears. Meanwhile, Mitty himself is finding a mystery woman to be a bit of a handful, not to mention rather assertive, as she hunts for a major secret on the world stage, which is nearly as important Mitty’s dignity.

It’s witty, fun, and forgettable, but if you need to waste a couple of hours, it’s not a bad choice.

Exposomics:

Success in mapping the human genome has fostered the complementary concept of the “exposome”. The exposome can be defined as the measure of all the exposures of an individual in a lifetime and how those exposures relate to health. An individual’s exposure begins before birth and includes insults from environmental and occupational sources. Understanding how exposures from our environment, diet, lifestyle, etc. interact with our own unique characteristics such as genetics, physiology, and epigenetics impact our health is how the exposome will be articulated.

Exposomics is the study of the exposome and relies on the application of internal and external exposure assessment methods. Internal exposure relies on fields of study such as genomicsExternal, metabonomicsExternal, lipidomicsExternal, transcriptomicsExternal and proteomicsExternal. Commonalities of these fields include 1) use of biomarkersExternal to determine exposure, effect of exposure, disease progression, and susceptibility factors, 2) use of technologies that result in large amounts of data and 3) use of data mining techniques to find statistical associations between exposures, effect of exposures, and other factors such as genetics with disease. External exposure assessment relies on measuring environmental stressors. Common approaches include using direct reading instruments, laboratory-based analysis, and survey instruments. The extent to which internal and external exposure assessment will contribute to our understanding of the exposome is being debated as each approach has certain merits. [CDC]

Noted in “How our environment is making us sick – and what we can do about it,” Graham Lawton, NewScientist (29 January 2022, paywall):

Now [geneticist Michael Snyder of Stanford] and others are attempting to spearhead a revolution in understanding how our environments make us sick. “It might sound similar to what has been done in the past, but now we’ve got this big concept,” says Michelle Bennett at the US National Cancer Institute Center for Research Strategy. Its name is exposomics, and big it certainly is – it aims to measure everything we are exposed to throughout our lives and link this with effects on our health. Can that ever succeed?

Why does Minnesota experience a spike in crime every winter?

Hudson mayor thinks ice fishing leads to prostitution! Put your poles away boys!*

*Same guy who thinks creative writing classes are child pornography. pic.twitter.com/9N0R2tVri6

— Amanda Weinstein (@ProfWeinstein) February 9, 2022

Evidently, the good mayor has no experience with ice fishing.

I thought Steve Benen summed up the pathology of the corpse of the conservative movement quite nicely:

If the Republican National Committee was striving for party “unity,” it failed spectacularly. Late last week, the RNC not only censured two of their conservative members without cause, it also accused the Jan. 6 committee of engaging in “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”

Ever since, leading Republican voices have been forced to take sides, either endorsing or criticizing their party’s avoidable mess. Yesterday, as NBC News reported, Congress’ most powerful GOP official decided it was his turn to weigh in.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell disagreed Tuesday with the Republican National Committee’s recent censure of two GOP lawmakers, as well as its characterization of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

“We all were here; we saw what happened,” the Kentucky Republican told reporters, referring to the events of Jan. 6. “It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election, from one administration to the next. That’s what it was.”

Denial of reality is a prime symptom of madness, but also of incompetency. By admitting to it, one loses social prestige, so that course is avoided at all courses. And the incompetent often feel put-upon, discouraged by their lower positions on the power ladder. Better to make shit up than return to the pit of sadness.

When an entire organization, such as the RNC, is incompetent at all the key positions, this is what we see: a denial of reality writ large. As Senator McConnell (R-KY) notes, anyone who was at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, is well aware that mob violence took place, police officers were injured, one died and others committed suicide later, and that it wasn’t instigated by the left, but instead was a phenomenon of the right. As he says, it was a violent insurrection.

And the RNC is hopping up and down in their frenzy of denial. House Minority leader McCarthy (R-CA) is reportedly running away from reporters. Senator Minority Leader McConnell is outright disputing the RNC’s message.

This is a movement in meltdown.

This is not to say the Democrats don’t have their own set of problems, leading off with their botching of the transgenderism debate – or, more accurately, lack thereof – and, more recently, their muddling of Critical Race Theory, and what’s turning out to be mismanagement of the crime problem, exacerbated by the shrinkage in the number of law enforcement personnel. I’ve mentioned their cognitive problems after the Virginia debate.

But the Republicans’ problems appear to be far worse. They’re symptomatic of the incompetent and the amateur, determined to retain that status, getting their paws on the levers of power and, discovering that their actions are inadequate to the problems of governing, deny the problems and redouble their ideologically driven efforts.

Adults would, at some point, reject or modify their ideologies. For these folks, their ideologies are their identities, and so they cannot be rejected, for with that comes social prestige degradation.

Go get some popcorn. Both sides are going to provide entertainment. My most sincere condolences to those who are actually hurt by these buffoons.

Prodrome:

In medicine, a prodrome is an early sign or symptom (or set of signs and symptoms) that often indicates the onset of a disease before more diagnostically specific signs and symptoms develop. It is derived from the Greek word prodromos, meaning “running before”. Prodromes may be non-specific symptoms or, in a few instances, may clearly indicate a particular disease, such as the prodromal migraine aura. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “We are finally beginning to understand migraines and how to treat them,” Jessica Hamzelou, NewScientist (29 January 2022, paywall):

Migraine attacks can begin with what is known as a premonitory phase, or prodrome, which can involve a range of symptoms, such as mood changes, neck stiffness and yawning. My prodrome is marked by a vague feeling that something bad is going to happen.

… when you die, sometimes you get this picture sent in response.

(h/t BP)

WaPo reports on an ad for the SuperBowl:

Americans tuning in to the Super Bowl on Sunday will be inundated with ads from cryptocurrency companies, including the trading platform FTX, which plans to give away millions of dollars in bitcoin.

FTX has spent heavily on sports partnerships to try to make itself a brand name in crypto, including an ad with NFL star Tom Brady, a sponsorship with Major League Baseball and a $135 million deal to rename the Miami Heat’s stadium the FTX Arena.

Co-founder and chief executive Sam Bankman-Fried, who recently moved FTX’s headquarters from Hong Kong to the Bahamas, says the ads are as much about courting U.S. regulators as getting customers to download its trading app.

“We want to make sure that we’re painting, hopefully, a healthy image of ourselves and the industry,” said Bankman-Fried, 29, who has a net worth of more than $24 billion, according to Forbes. “We’re optimistic that we’re going to be able to grow our U.S. business — a lot of that is working with U.S. regulators on bringing new products to market.”

There’s nothing more American than buying your way into consumer hearts via marketing. Doing so with fake money is a bit more unusual, though.

Which brings us to this CNN/Business story:

A New York couple has been arrested and charged with conspiring to launder $4.5 billion in stolen cryptocurrency funds. Law enforcement officials have seized $3.6 billion of those funds in what US Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco called “the department’s largest financial seizure ever.

Ilya Lichtenstein, 34, and his wife, Heather Morgan, 31, are accused of trying to launder money taken in a huge hack of cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex in 2016.

The arrests and money seizure mark a win for US law enforcement amid a slew of heists from cryptocurrency platforms. Hackers have in recent years made off with hundreds of millions of dollars at time in attacks on virtual currency exchanges.

Lichtenstein and Morgan are charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering, which carries up to 20 years in prison, and conspiracy to defraud the US, which carries up to five years in prison, according to Justice officials. An attorney for the couple could not be immediately reached for comment.

Besides illustrating the vulnerability of cryptocurrencies and the volume that can be lost, it leaves me a bit bemused to consider they’re trying to launder fake money. Oh, I know, the gold bugs would argue the same happens with greenbacks, but there’s a key difference: the US Government stands behind the greenback.

There’s nothing behind the cryptocurrencies but dreams. Or delusions.

Which means that today’s $4.5 billion could become far less tomorrow.

Erick Erickson has a lovely piece on current social dynamics:

We’re in an Age of Betrayal.

We know fewer people personally. We connect to people online. We become “friends” with the person on Instagram and obsess about their lives. All we know is what they show us on social media. When it turns out they have views diametrically opposed to ours, we hate them. They betray us. We’ve created our connection, to a degree, in our heads by extrapolating ancillary information to what is presented. When they provide the actual ancillary information and it does not match that which we conjured in our heads, we feel betrayed.

Celebrity culture, even in the church, can do that. In politics, we spend time in battles with people fighting alongside us. Then one day we find ourselves on opposite sides and feel betrayed. More often than not, we cannot agree to disagree. We must be aggrieved and launch subtweets.

And I’d take it further. The behavior of joining forces with those of apparently like-mindedness in politics is what has brought victories to the left and the right. The Senate these days is merely this lesson writ large: the actions of Murkowski, Collins, Manchin, and Sinema have been shocking because they are betrayals of their side – at least to the zealots of each side. Most of the time, the Senate and the House votes in political blocs, careful to remain loyal to the leader – rather than their judgment.

This isn’t how it’s always been. Sparing you the white cane and quavering voice^[1], it was not unusual, forty or fifty years ago, to see Democrats and Republicans often voting for each other’s legislation. “Reach across the aisle” was neither unusual nor betrayal; it was simply how important things got done.

It was called politics, and it ended not too long after the Soviet Union collapse, thank you Professor Turchin^[2].

These days, rather than discuss across the aisle, in order to avoid being called Traitor! you stick to the team charter and don’t deviate.

Erickson cites Dave Chappelle and Joe Rogan as two who’ve acted as betrayers, and while I’m not overly familiar with either of them, I’ve gotta say that if Rogan is busy boosting anti-vax people, that endangers people’s lives. While the omicron variant seems far less dangerous than delta, and I hope we can dispense with the masks soon enough, it’s becoming clear that 900,000 people dead, from all walks of life and age, isn’t enough to get some folks’ attention.

And that’s just fuckin’ dangerous.

But before I go too far astray, I’ll restrain myself. I think Erickson’s observations concerning social dynamics interacting with social media are accurate. Speaking for social media prior to its migration onto the Internet (i.e., BBSes), most social media was strictly local, and that meant there was a greater chance of meeting the people on the other side of the modem screech than there is today. That often humanized your opponents – I vividly remember a rather cantankerous, even bitter, online dude turned out to be a skinny guy with big ears, who was dragged out of a party by his girlfriend – she grabbed him by the ear and told him to settle down.

It’s hard to be mad at a guy after witnessing that.

So, remember, there’s a good chance that your “opponent” is a human being with the same foibles that you have, next time you’re thinking of digging into the Team Tactics Book. Maybe they deserve a gentler thrashing, eh?

¹ There, that should be lodged in your brain for the rest of the day.

² See his Secular Cycles.

From the description (abstract?) from a while back for “New fossil reveals early and rapid evolution of giant Mesozoic ichthyosaurs,” Martin Sanders, et al, an article published in Science, but this description published on EurekaAlert!:

Although whales are now the largest of Earth’s creatures, they were not the first ocean giants to ply the seas. In a new study, researchers report the discovery of new and exceptionally large ichthyosaur fossils, which hint at an early and rapid burst in the evolution of extreme body size in Mesozoic oceans. While it took whales about 90% of their 55-million-year history to evolve into the ocean giants we know today, ichthyosaurs evolved to similar sizes in the first 1% of their 150-million-year history on Earth. The findings suggest that Triassic marine food webs could support such massive creatures, despite the absence of many primary producers following the Permian extinction 252 million years ago.

All it takes is finding an ichthyosaur fossil a hundred million years earlier to mess up the conclusions.

But upon finding a unique fossil, conclusions have to be drawn, don’t they? If only to challenge the current wisdom, to get researchers thinking and questioning assumptions.

And the skull of this specimen is bigger than me. There’s a bunch of pics out there, but I think they’re all protected under copyright, so I’ll let them be. Here’s a useful search.

For years, and much like cryptocurrency, I’ve been puzzling over the exact advantages brought by self-driving cars, especially as such a subsystem consumes substantial amounts of energy. David Zipper, who studies such topics at Harvard Kennedy School’s Taubman Center for State and Local Government, shares my bewilderment:

It’s understandable that companies want to maximize shareholder return; that’s their role in a market economy. But automakers are still struggling to explain why, exactly, we should be excited about this technology, rather than alarmed by it. We shouldn’t let them off the hook unless we have a convincing answer. [WaPo]

And if such technology was “successfully” introduced, I can’t help but remember the movie WALL-E (2008) in which the humans had been reduced to blobs of near-helpless protoplasm, until the automated systems had taken over because they couldn’t accomplish their primary mission without doing so.

Not that I’m saying that our future robotic overlords will be that Tesla sitting in your driveway. That’ll be something else.

But I’m really quite hesitant about this technological advance, particularly in view of this:

Book Of Love (2022) is easy enough to summarize.

squirm
Squirm
SQuirm
Oh, that was a little funny.
SQUIRM!
Thank goodness, it’s –
NO NO NO SQUIRM!
squirm
Squirm!
SQUIRM-stop that-SQUIRM!

The End.

And a few more pics before scampering off to the grocery store:

Admirable precise detail!

A beautiful reference to an unfortunately morally compromised Olympics.

Perhaps a bit puzzling, but intriguing.

Simple, yet evocative.

I want to say Lovecraftian, but probably not.

And God’s sneeze begat Minnesota?

A snoot of honey for you, my friend.

Lovely!

Not exactly sure.

We’ve saw you earlier, camera-hog!

And that’s it for 2022 sculpting! Congrats to everyone who braved the cold to indulge the artistic impulse!

Professor Richardson provides a useful transcript of Steve Bannon, a Donald Trump associate and former editor at Breitbart, discussing his view of former Vice President Pence and his former staff members talking to the January 6th Insurrection investigation committee:

Certainly, Trump loyalist Stephen Bannon recognized Pence’s words as a defection. On his podcast, Bannon addressed Pence, saying: “You are a stone cold coward…. My head’s blowing up…. I can’t take Pence…and Marc Short and all these Koch guys up there ratting out Trump up on Capitol Hill right now.”

I’m not one to romanticize our history, but it does seem worth noting that it was on this day in 1789 that the Electoral College unanimously elected George Washington the first president of the new United States. It seems that we might be able to choose better leaders than ones who are leaving us at the end of this day in 2022 with the truly legitimate political question: “Ratting him out for what?”

And, for those readers unfamiliar with the phrase ratting out, it’s an old-fashioned reference to former members of the Mob releasing information to law enforcement concerning crimes committed by Mob bosses and their minions.

Bannon is, essentially, admitting crimes occurred, as many pundits are recogniziing.

But I think it’s also interesting in that it’s an admission that a significant portion of the Republican Party is ready and willing to commit crimes to gain and retain power. This means that a significant portion of a political party which has controlled, and probably will control again, portions of the State and Federal governments does not have respect for the law by which we run this country.

That means, in essence, that they are unpredictable, that the rules of society will change if they are put in charge, and that’s something most of society hates, because it changes the societal realities we’ve come to depend on.

Bannon’s remarks have more relevance than just to Trump, but also to the entire MAGA cult and a significant portion of the Republicans. He may come to regret letting his mouth run his life.

Kilonovae:

A kilonova (also called a macronova or r-process supernova) is a transient astronomical event that occurs in a compact binary system when two neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole merge. Kilonovae are thought to emit short gamma-ray bursts and strong electromagnetic radiation due to the radioactive decay of heavy r-process nuclei that are produced and ejected fairly isotropically during the merger process. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “How does the sun shine? Here’s why we are still a little in the dark,” Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, NewScientist (22 January 2022):

Generally speaking, the reason stars shine is that gravity has pulled a sufficient amount of hydrogen atoms into such close quarters that they start to fuse together into helium. Every star starts this way. When the hydrogen runs out, the helium starts fusing together, and so on, producing heavier and heavier elements.

This is where we humans begin. The majority of the elements we are composed of are made in stars and, during supernovae and kilonovae, the exploding deaths of those massive stars.

This sounds like a simple matter of gluing elements together, but it isn’t: the conditions have to be just right. The hydrogen has to be hot enough and close enough together to fuse. And the fusion happens in stages. The theories that describe how all this happens aren’t the classical Newtonian physics that describes, for example, two football players colliding when they both want to control the ball. Instead, we need quantum mechanics and nuclear physics.

Josh Barro shares my viewpoint, but far more articulately, on cryptocurrencies:

While I hate the aesthetics of crypto, my complaint here is not principally aesthetic. As someone who is in general more favorable to the social value of finance than a lot of commentators these days — especially on the left but sometimes on the right too — I want finance to be useful, serious, and furthering the production of useful products and services in the real economy.

I want banks lending for the construction of new buildings; equity markets making it possible for the most promising companies to raise funds to build useful products; bond markets making cheap and efficient financing available for public and private activities that will support payment of interest on the bonds. I was a big champion of the Fed’s actions to rescue the financial system in spring 2020 because I know a robust and liquid financial system isn’t just something people on Wall Street like — it’s something that makes it possible to get a mortgage, use a credit card, remain employed at a company, and generally enjoy all the things made possible by a modern economy.

And I am concerned that tens of millions of Americans investing in a stupid market with no such thing as fundamental value — and where prices should not keep going up and up and up, though I’ve grown weary of saying that and watching them do so anyway — is likely to lead to significant financial dislocation and reduced trust in the financial system when a lot of them lose their shirts.

Which sort of reminds me of the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2000. Or 2001. Whenever. A lot of people lost money when that pus-filled balloon finely finally blew up, including me.

Barro knows more about finance than I do. Go read him.

Continuing the show:

The Jetsons and their pickup truck.

Tasty tidbit time.

A bit of manic music.

I like the detail, but the nod to Disney’s Aladdin somehow irritates me.

Surreal, to be sure. Or your brain on ice cream.

Aldous J Pennyfarthing on The Daily Kos has some remarks on Trump’s Troops that are interesting, although I’m not entirely certain who he’s quoting:

Many of the GOP candidates Trump is backing in open-seat races are struggling to raise significant funds as well against better-funded opponents—and every single one of the GOP candidates Trump has endorsed against a GOP incumbent is getting crushed in fundraising, according to newly released campaign finance reports.

Oh, things aren’t going quite so swimmingly for Bone Spurious the Betrayer? Let’s see. Should I take pity on the big, dopey animal or … go in a different direction?

How should I put this? …

Even strong-performing Trump allies are getting lapped in fundraising. Trump-backed Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker raised almost $5.4 million in the past three months and has about the same amount in the bank. That’s a huge haul, but Georgia Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock far outpaced him, bringing in $9.8 million in the same time period. Warnock has $22.9 million in the bank for what’s sure to be one of this cycle’s most expensive Senate races.

Every single one of the House candidates Trump has endorsed against a GOP incumbent is getting shellacked in fundraising as well.

Oh, but that’s not all.

Rep. Mo Brooks, who’s running for U.S. Senate with Trump’s endorsement, raised less than $400,000 from October through December, and two of his primary opponents, Katie Boyd Britt and Mike Durant, each have $4 million war chests—double Brooks’ $2 million in reserves.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who voted to impeach Trump last year—thereby rousing his black, bloodless knot of a heart to something resembling movement—has $4.3 million in the bank, or seven times her opponent Kelly Tshibaka’s meager $634,000 haul.

And there’s more, but that’s enough. The interesting question is: Why?

Is MAGA cult members becoming tapped out?

Are they losing interest in politics?

Or are the endorsees simply so repulsive that they can’t attract strong donations?

I’m going for the last, but that’s a case of confirmation bias; I think we’ll have to wait to see what the real answer might be. Regardless, while votes are not usually buyable, they do bring attention to candidates. A failure to attract money is like a corpse not attracting flies: What’s going on here, and do we need to worry about it?

Or “So Wrong She’s Not Even Wrong.” Maybe she’s just desperate to squeeze a bit more cash out of the audience:

Sherri Tenpenny is an influential religious-right anti-vaccine activist who has testified before the Ohio state House, appeared on Charlie Kirk’s podcast, and been a speaker at multiple ReAwaken America events, where she has shared the stage with the likes of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Eric Trump, Mike Lindell, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, and Alex Jones.

Despite the fact that Tenpenny is osteopathic doctor with no expertise on vaccines, she regularly appears on right-wing programs where she spreads wild conspiracy theories about COVID-19 vaccines.

Recently, she has begun to claim that COVID-19 vaccines are designed to create “quantum entanglement” between those who take them and the internet in an effort to turn humanity into “transhumanist cyborgs.”

“The stated goal is to depopulate the planet and the ones that are left, either make them chronically sick or turn them into transhumanist cyborgs that can be manipulated externally by 5G, by magnets, by all sorts of things,” Tenpenny said during an appearance on “The Stew Peters Show” Thursday night. “I got dragged through the mud by the mainstream media when I said that in May of last year in front of the House committee in Columbus, [Ohio]. Well, guess what? It’s all true.”

“The whole issue of quantum entanglement and what the shots do in terms of the frequencies and the electronic frequencies that come inside of your body and hook you up to the ‘Internet of Things,’ the quantum entanglement that happens immediately after you’re injected,” she continued. “You get hooked up to what they’re trying to develop. It’s called the hive mind, and they want all of us there as a node and as an electronic avatar that is an exact replica of us except it’s an electronic replica, it’s not our God given body that we were born with. And all of that will be running through the metaverse that they’re talking about. All of these things are real, Stew. All of them. And it’s happening right now. It’s not some science fiction thing happening out in the future; it’s happening right now in real time.” [Right Wing Watch]

Ummmm, no. But not “just no.” The need to giggle and even applaud this ridiculous person is a bit overwhelming.

I mean, yes, taking advantage of an audience who doesn’t know what it means to be in a quantum entanglement is desperately unethical and immoral. This is a woman whose moral model is so terribly at odds with that of the vast majority of Americans, political leanings irrelevant, that she should probably be placed under restraints for both her own safety and the safety of others. That’s how bad it is.

But, in terms of communications style, she’s a little like Erick Erickson and his ilk, who I’ve observed using phrases like objective evidence and scientific arguments as if they’re magical incantations. Tenpenny has evidently gathered up some of the terms from one of the least intuitive and most difficult to understand scientific fields out there, thrown them at the side of a building covered in old bubble-gum, and taken what’s stuck in random order in order to bamboozle an audience that may not even have heard of the field, despite the fact that the very computers they use are built on pivotal parts of quantum mechanics.

But, invoking the classic We’re all victims! approach to communications, she declares she was ridiculed, and yet She Was Right! As much as I’d love to be able to writer Ah, if she were only right, but the consequences for reality might be devastating, as in Why did the Moon just become a black hole that’s about to suck us-

While I expect that, someday, her audience will wise up to her grifter tactics and chase her out of town, it won’t be on this one. Much like fake pastors who proclaim themselves prophets because there’s no likelihood of someone listening in on their convos with the divine, she’s wisely kept her path way out where no one else but quantum physicists will tread, and I don’t doubt the audience has already been vaccinated against trusting most scientists. She’ll trip over something else someday in her greed and immorality, but not this grift.

More than a year ago, Eitan Hersh published this in The Atlantic:

In the aggregate, the political right is making donations more strategically than the political left. As political scientists have long described, conservative funders such as Charles Koch have spent decades planning for the long term. They have invested in the next generation of state and municipal politicians and organizers across the country. They invest in state legislative lobbying. Understanding the political value of local church groups and gun clubs, they don’t see grassroots organizing as parochial and beneath them. They see it as key to durable control of government. Meanwhile, the biggest and most notable spenders on the Democratic side include Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer, who sometimes invest in worthwhile long-term grassroots strategies, but who will be best remembered for together spending nearly $1.5 billion on their own long-shot presidential bids: short-term, top-down, and vain.

And for all their planning and money, what did they get? Long-time readers know the names: Gaetz, Greene, Boebert, Cawthorn, Gohmert, Nunes, Risch, McConnell, Kennedy, and dozens of others. At the Federal and State levels, the far-right conservative donors have discovered that the brethren they funded are a bunch of fourth-raters who think winning a seat was the goal.

And then ring the bell and let their inner-nuts loose.

And so Hersh, or at least his political scientists, should be embarrassed. Winning is merely a stepping stone; the goal is effective and wise governance. The right advocated for absolutist gun rights and now hide out on luxury yachts when the fear of being picked off takes them, they participate in ludicrous lies and hypocrisy about SCOTUS, they believe their broken abortion logic should be inflicted on everyone, and then there’s the 30,000 lies of the former President!

This is not wise investing, is it?

Not that he’s wrong about “rage-donating,” a description of Democratic fund donation “strategy”, which was fun to read. It reminds me that a lot of Americans have thoroughly ingested the philosophy of the private sector, where virtually everything can be bought and sold. Sadly for the Democrats who gave money to long-shot candidates in incredible volume, It Just Doesn’t Work That Way when it comes to voting.

But to suggest that the fact that the conservatives often control the legislatures due to wise investments is to ignore the part that gerrymandering and many other morally dubious strategies have played in the drama of American politics, and, worse yet, to fail to understand the nature of victory. Putting the current pack of half-wits in charge of the legislatures of the nation isn’t victory for the Republicans.

It’s disaster, for the nation and the Republicans.

Some pics of the recent St. Paul Winter Carnival’s snow sculpture competition. These were taken near dusk, which explains why some are a little gray.

I’m not sure what that might be.

Sorry, dude, but that’s a bit big even for you to lift off the ground.

Lovely.

Didn’t make it to the toilet, did he?

Singin’ the blues.

Sadly, I think this is the last day of display for the sculptures.

WaPo reports on the latest remarks from former President Trump:

Former president Donald Trump on Tuesday advocated a new focus for congressional investigators: why then-Vice President Mike Pence did not take steps on Jan. 6, 2021, to reject electoral college votes from several states won by Joe Biden.

Trump’s exhortation came two days after he created an uproar with a statement suggesting Pence should have “overturned” the election as he presided over the counting of electoral college votes by Congress.

In a fresh statement Tuesday, Trump offered a more nuanced take on what he would have liked to have seen from Pence, saying he “could have sent the votes back to various legislators for reassessment after so much fraud and irregularities were found.”

And you know what? I think Speaker Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Schumer (D-NY) should offer the Republicans the opportunity to form their own Select Panel to investigate the former Vice President.

Make them vote on it.

Watch them squirm.

Because if they vote for it, they stay in the former President’s good graces while shit-canning the former Vice President. He’ll have been implicitly rejected by both Trump and the Republican establishment. His supporters will be mortally offended and never vote Republican again, or at least not for the MAGA-oafs.

And if they vote against establishing such a panel, every NO! vote will be considered a betrayal of  the former President, and both he and the MAGA cult will never forgive them.

And on top of that, every legal expert in the country will tell us that there’s nothing to find. Pence’s role was purely ceremonial. All of the faux-controversy over the votes was finished. The conclusion of such a panel will be that Pence never had the opportunity to indulge in such a betrayal of the nation.

Go on, Speaker Pelosi, Leader Schumer. You know you want to.

WaPo has a report on that mysterious phenomenon known as extreme lightning:

The World Meteorological Organization announced on Monday that it had confirmed two new mind-blowing lightning “megaflash” records. The findings, which come after careful data-checking and rigorous certification processes, include one record event that occurred over the Lower 48 states.

On April 29, 2020, a sprawling mass of strong to severe thunderstorms produced a 477.2-mile-long lightning strike over the southern United States. It stretched from near Houston to southeast Mississippi, a distance equivalent to that between Columbus, Ohio, and New York City.

The record beats out a 440-mile-long megaflash that occurred over southern Brazil on Halloween of 2018.

The WMO also identified a new world record for the long-lasting lightning flash. It lit up the skies over Uruguay and northern Argentina for 17.1 seconds on June 18, 2020, surpassing a 16.73-second flash recorded over northern Argentina on March 4, 2019.

And that question would be: are these phenomena sensitive to climate change?