Monthly Archives: June 2022

This was momentarily distressing:

To complicate things even further, there have been documented cases of zoos faking panda bears. For instance, a zoo in Taiwan was reportedly caught dying a sun bear black and white and marketing it as a panda in the late 1980s. An Italian circus was also caught dying puppies black-and-white in an effort to pass them off as pandas in 2014. Such incidents clearly have given skeptics ammunition to believe that panda bears as a whole aren’t real. [RollingStone]

The word they want is dyeing, I believe, and if it’s not, it should be.

Dicta:

Dicta are judicial opinions expressed by the judges on points that do not necessarily arise in the case. [The ‘Lectric Law Library]

Noted in “GOP-appointed justices make combating climate crisis much harder,” Steve Benen, Maddowblog:

In biting dicta, [Associated Justice] Kagan poked her conservative colleagues for their casual indifference to their purported principles. “Some years ago, I remarked that ‘[w]e’re all textualists now.’ It seems I was wrong,” she wrote. “The current Court is textualist only when being so suits it.”

See here for my commentary on how SCOTUS has achieved this depressing low in public opinion.

All I can add is that the conservative justices themselves have demonstrated the solution for the mistakes they’re making: overturning these problematic rulings. The raw political power being practiced here by the conservative wing of the Court has a number of shortcomings in a democracy, while persuasive arguments do not suffer permanently from its inherent problems like raw political power.

And apparently the extremist conservatives failed in persuasion, and so are moving on to the flawed raw political power phase of their failing political movement.

Having just watched the Colbert interview of Rep Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who is not running for reelection, all I can say is that maybe Illinois Republicans should wage a write-in campaign for him.

Articulate and principled. He makes Greene, Gaetz, Boebert, and that crowd look like children who lit their hair on fire at the urging of a pyromaniac.

The latest updates, taken best with your favorite cartoons…

• SemDem on Daily Kos has a fascinating article on Ukrainian-Americans and the Republican fight to, apparently, alienate this reliable Republican voting bloc. It reminds me that fourth raters can often be identified by how often they step on their dicks – and then don’t admit it.
• Republicans, feeling their oats after SCOTUS overturned Roe v Wade with Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, are now talking about a nation-wide abortion ban. That’s unlikely to go down well with most Americans.
• An early post-Dobbs poll of generic Democrats vs Republicans show the Democrats have flipped the balance to their side of the teeter totter, 48-41. What that means in an already polarized environment is not clear, although it may mean the House will remain under the sway of Democrats. And it’s only one week. Show me four polls with similar results and I might pronounce it as significant.
• Senate candidate J. D. Vance (R-OH) thinks pregnancies, even those from rape, are an inconvenience. In what promises to be a hotly contested race against experienced Rep Tim Ryan (D) for an open Senate seat, will outraged Republican and independent women voters dump him by the side of the road, rather than in Ohio’s soon-to-be-empty Senate seat? And, even more importantly, will those outraged women continue to be outraged when it comes to voting for their Congressional Representative? Down-ballot damage can be a bitch.
• The surprise sixth televised hearing of the January 6th investigatory panel certainly demonstrates a President desperate to retain power, laws, rules, and traditions be damned. But what impact will this have on the various Senate races? Stay tuned.
• In Colorado, the June 28th GOP primary resulted in John O’Dea winning the GOP nomination to face Senator Michael Bennet. For those paying attention, it appears the Colorado GOP has a taste for relatively moderate candidates, rejecting such specimens as indicted elections clerk and candidate for Colorado Secretary of State Tina Peters. Incidentally, Peters then denied that her own primary lost loss, claiming it was rigged. Toss her in the bin with all the other whiners.
• The June 28th primary for the Oklahoma Senate seat held by incumbent James Lankford (R) has resulted in the selection of Lankford (68% of GOP primary voters selected him) by the Republicans and inexperienced Madison Horn (37%) by the Democrats. While a plurality win like Horn’s isn’t usually significant for the easy-going Democrats, Lankford’s majority victory is, perhaps, surprisingly weak; in 2016 he did not even face a primary opponent. But the far-right in Oklahoma is disappointed that he didn’t vote against counting electoral votes on January 6, 2021. That 32% of GOP voters desired someone other than an experienced Senator, possibly because his TrumpScore is only 86.8%, may indicate a fracture in the Oklahoma GOP, but is it great enough to let Horn slip through? I doubt it, but I’ll hold my breath until polls come out.
• In the special election to replace Oklahoma Senator Inhofe (R-OK) for the final four years of his term, Rep Markwayne Mullin attained the primary runoff with 43.7% of the GOP voter ballots, while T. W. Shannon, with a less impressive 17.5%, will be in the other slot. As noted before, former Rep Kendra Horn (D-OK) will meet the winner of the runoff, who I expect will be Mullin. Does Mullin’s plurality indicate weakness? Does his attempts to attract former President Trump’s attention bring doubt upon his campaign, now that Trump appears to be in serious legal trouble? Probably not. But it’s worth keeping half an eye on this contest.
• Former EPA Administrator for President Trump, and stricken with multiple scandals during his tenure, Scott Pruitt (R-OK) came in fifth in the primary for the special election to replace Senator Inhofe (R-OK). This is more noteworthy than it sounds, as Pruitt tried to campaign on the scandals to his advantage, and failed. At least portions of the GOP have little patience for naked power-seekers. Sorry about the visual.
• In Georgia a new Quinnipiac University Poll shows incumbent Senator Warnock (D) with a ten point lead (±2.5 points) over challenger and former NFL star Herschel Walker (R). This is particularly of interest: In today’s poll, Democrats (97 – 2 percent) and independents (62 – 33 percent) back Warnock, while Republicans (93 – 7 percent) back Walker. First, independents are leaning to the Democrats, which may explain Georgia resident and leading right-wing pundit Erick Erickson’s panicked public posts over the last couple of days. Second, the Republicans are strongly in Walker’s corner, which suggests they’d rather have power than a reasonable representative. I consider Warnock to be far more reasonable than Walker, who gets kudos for being forthright concerning his mental illness – but that’s not an excuse for speaking gibberish concerning the Uvalde tragedy, but more a reason to sit out the election, or vote for Senator and Pastor Warnock.
• With a slogan unfortunately reminiscent of at least one slogan of failed and disgraced former President Trump, “the only Republican who can defeat Tammy Duckworth in the fall,” Kathy Salvi won the Republican primary in Illinois, and the right to challenge incumbent Senator Duckworth (D). Potentially hampering her effort is the fact that her plurality victory consists of winning 30.5% of the GOP primary vote. If the losers’ supporters are embittered, as sometimes happens in GOP contests of late, then Salvi will have a very difficult hill to climb.
• Krystie Matthews (D-SC), a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives, won the right to challenge incumbent Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), emerging from a primary runoff in which she had to come from behind. No polls seem to be available just yet, but it’s South Carolina, so I expect Senator Scott to win another term.

Previous update here.

One of the behaviors of the insurrectionists of January 6th, 2021 that has puzzled me has been the lack of focus of the rioters. They break in, saunter about, engage in some chanting, steal stuff, shit on other stuff, and then saunter out.

Sure, these are not the brightest bulbs from the factory.

But yesterday’s hearing clarifies that their lack of focus was caused by the inadvertent lack of leadership, as Professor Richardson’s summary of the hearing really makes clear:

Hutchinson testified that Trump was determined to go to the Capitol with the crowd despite the desperate efforts of White House Counsel Pat Cipollone to make sure it didn’t happen. Cipollone told Hutchinson that Trump’s appearance there would open the White House up to being charged with “every crime imaginable” because it would look like Trump was inciting a riot. Nonetheless, Trump was furious that Meadows had not been able to persuade the Secret Service to make it happen, so furious that Cassidy heard from others that when he found that the SUV in which he was riding would not take him to the Capitol, Trump had lunged at the agent refusing to take him there.

Hutchinson did not know what the plan was for Trump’s trip to the Capitol, but there was talk of an additional speech there, “before he went in. I know that there was a conversation about him going into the House chamber at one point,” she said. The president is only supposed to go into the House chamber when specifically invited, so perhaps he expected to be invited in, or perhaps he was going in without an invitation, or perhaps those talking about it were just tossing out unworkable ideas.

All of a sudden it becomes clear that, without Trump, the rioters, who were not trained nor instructed that anything more than a riot would take place, made a push, but then really got lost.

Many were afflicted, as they subsequently testified, with buyer’s remorse, as it were. Without Trump there to stir the pot, they just moved around randomly and then ran away when so instructed.

The Secret Service may have saved the bacon for the Senators and House members. Senator Cruz (R-TX), despite objecting on specious grounds to the electoral votes of the swing states and thus showing his alliance with Team Trump, had better thank them after this hearing, because a crowd like that, despite Trump’s hypothetical leadership, could have easily executed everyone in sight on the excuse that It’s time to clean house and start over.

Great things sometimes happens for those who are faithful to their duties.

This was the first surprise hearing of the series, which certainly will raise questions in and of itself: are witnesses in existential danger, or simply that they might turn shy after Trumpian blandishments are communicated to them, as the last five minutes of the hearing indicated?

The hearing itself didn’t put a stake through anyone’s heart, but Mark Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson, self-possessed and articulate even as she sweated, certainly did some damage. Under Rep Cheney’s (R-WY) guidance, we were given an eye-witness account of the activities of former President Trump, his Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and various bit players.

Much of it was new and fascinating. It wasn’t hard to imagine veins throbbing in Meadows’ forehead during the broadcast, because he came out looking fairly awful. I don’t think it’s particularly insightful to state that the biggest unsolved mystery brought to light is the question of who Meadows was talking to on the phone when he refused to let Hutchinson into his car during the event at The Ellipse, where the former President gave his incitement speech. A grocery list from his wife? Confidential discussions with White House staff?

Instructions from an outside agency?

I don’t know if phone records will be available to solve the mystery, but I sure hope so.

In the end, though, the real goal of this hearing was to get the message out to other witnesses, both future and past: Information may spare you prison time. Obstinacy, such general Flynn “taking the Fifth” when it comes to whether he thinks a peaceful transfer of power is a good thing, may land you in a morass of dishonor, as well as prison.

Witnesses should think soberly about the costs of being on “Team Trump.” He won’t be loyal to you when your usefulness has passed, why be loyal to him?

Slip opinion:

“Slip” opinions are the first version of the Court’s opinions posted on this website. A “slip” opinion consists of the majority or principal opinion, any concurring or dissenting opinions written by the Justices, and a prefatory syllabus prepared by the Reporter’s Office that summarizes the decision. … These opinions are posted on the website within minutes after the opinions are issued and will remain posted until the opinions for the entire Term are published in the bound volumes of the United States Reports. For further information, see Column Header Definitions and Information About Opinions. [SCOTUS]

Noted in “Sotomayor says Gorsuch flubbed prayer case facts (and she’s right),” Steve Benen, Maddowblog:

For those who’ve never read a slip opinion from the Supreme Court, it’s worth emphasizing that they almost never include images: Justices write their opinions, concurrences, and dissents — and that’s it. There’s nothing but text.

But in her dissent yesterday, Sotomayor took the highly unusual step of including several photographs to prove her point: The images showed the high school coach engaged in public worship with public school student athletes — minors who were seeking their coach’s approval, and who needed to stay on his good side if they intended to play — at public school events.

I actually did read small parts of that opinion, which is not a hobby of mine, and I recall shaking my head over Gorsuch’s description of the dispute. It didn’t accord with news reports, but, hey, I’m not a lawyer.

It appears, though, that Sotomayor has caught Gorsuch with his pants down. Perhaps that’s an unfortunate metaphor.

But, with all due respect to SCOTUS‘ conservative wing, it does appear that they are in the process of crashing and burning. There’s been a string of really doubtful opinions of late when it comes to religious issues, such as the egregious blunder in Carson v. Makin, Dobbs (aka the overturning of Roe v Wade), and now this decision, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District.

In addition, neither Alito, with a petulant side-note in Dobbs, nor Thomas, who in a concurring opinion to Dobbs scoots much further out on the right-wing tree limb than Alito or the other three who voted Yes on Dobbs, comes out of Dobbs with a shining halo. They had an agenda on their minds, used Dobbs as their horse to fulfill it, and didn’t apologize for blowing up stare decisis with bad history or bad reasoning.

And now Justice Gorsuch, IJ, is shown to be a religious hack as well, falsifying facts when they don’t fit his narrative.

This probably isn’t severe enough to warrant an impeachment, and the Republican Senators would never stand for it, but it’s worth noting that misrepresentation is not a mild offense at the SCOTUS level. Maybe Gorsuch doesn’t understand that. Or maybe he’s in such thrall to religious doctrine that he can’t help himself.

Long-time readers will recall some posts concerning the CAHOOTS program of Eugene, OR, in which mental health specialists are sent to emergency calls specifying a mental health emergency, rather than police. Denver has implemented something similar and is reporting success:

Cities across the US, including New York, Washington DC and San Francisco, are experimenting with programmes to address mental health emergencies without police involvement. After the implementation of a pilot programme in Denver, Colorado, non-violent crime rates decreased by 34 per cent in participating police precincts.

The Support Team Assisted Response (STAR) Program in Denver involves mental health specialists and paramedics responding to non-violent emergencies instead of police. [NewScientist (18 June 2022, paywall)]

Is that decline due to simply not reporting the incidents handled by STAR as crimes? And is that inappropriate? Maybe not.

But…

There was no impact on rates of violent crime.

But also ..

“[People] might be concerned that not having police at lower-level crimes might lead to an escalation of something more violent, and that simply did not happen,” says Dee.

I wonder how the combined budgets of police and mental health compare to the budget for the police prior to the initiation of the STAR program. Some hint is given:

STAR was also more cost-effective than traditional police programmes. Dee says that in six months, STAR prevented an estimated 1376 criminal offences and cost $208,141. That implies a cost of $150 per offence prevented, says Dee. In comparison, minor criminal offences cost the criminal justice system an estimated $646 each due to related expenses like imprisonment and prosecution.

In the wake of the overturning of Roe v Wade by the Roberts Court, there’s a move afoot to defend the decision to the conservatives and, maybe, independents, at least by Erick Erickson – and I suspect other right-wing pundits as well. If Erickson is typical, I’d say they’re operating off of a blinkered view of history, which more authoritative people than I will tear them a new one.

But I can’t resist. Here’s Erickson, aware that the arguments advanced are a bit dubious, at his best august authoritativeness:

One cannot find an abortion right. There is not one in American history that one can point to as defining it.

There is no right to marry in the constitution, but one can point to American history and say there must be that right. Why? Because George and Martha Washington did not have to remarry once the constitution was ratified. It was just accepted. The same goes for the right to own property, which the constitution hints at because of the necessity of compensating people for taking their property. But abortion? No state permitted it until around the time of Roe. Intellectually, whether one supports abortion or not, that has to be understood as a bridge too far for the Supreme Court’s constitutional jurisprudence.

There’s a couple of problems with this rather haphazard argument. The first one will bother astute engineers, and I suspect lawyers as well. An argument that goes Well, it’s always been this way is the sort of argument that raises red flags. If your theoretical model, your legal theory, lacks an explanation of any reasonable power for something like this, what you have isn’t a viable theory, it’s a results-oriented hack that should be distrusted and discarded at the earliest opportunity.

Second, if there an insistence on trying to hide behind this argument, well, the Emperor has not clothes. Abortion is not an invention of the last fifty years. Not the last one hundred years. Consulting the archaeological and historical literature, helpfully summarized by Wikipedia, reveals that abortion has been around about as long as marriage, for as long as women have had to manage their families in the face of unwanted pregnancies. To suggest marriage should be permitted because George Washington was married when the Union was formed, while abortion should be banned because it allegedly wasn’t is to ignore simple history.

Has it been banned? Sure, various forms of it have been banned. So has marriage, as Loving v. Virginia demonstrates, and one can go back and find all sorts of bans on marriage – between members of various religious sects, between social classes, second marriages, between foreign citizens to domestic, interracial, there’s more than I can think of, I’m sure.

But Loving v. Virginia, et al, demonstrates another shortcoming of using historical standing as a justification for a law: justice is not defined by historical standing. Justice and injustice are a matter, ideally, of social debate, compromise, and agreement; non-ideally, as in the recent overturning of Roe v Wade, it’s the result of a tyranny of a minority that, behind the curtain of a Constitutional theory of lawmaking, has permitted minority representatives make a law with which most of the electorate disagrees. Which is to say, on this hard subject, a small minority is claiming a right to set the law after having lost the debate.

Erickson’s historical assertion is, at its most basic, and to slightly misquote his comrade lawyer Rudy Giuliani, a result in search of a legal theory. His audience cannot rest easy based on this excuse, no matter how much he tries to play it.

But wait, there’s more!

And [the right] won. It took fifty years and several setbacks, including David Souter, but they won.

They did it democratically.

Erickson likes to cling to his theory that this was all done democratically, which lets him accuse the left of being a bunch of dangerous, ummmm, whiners. But as I pointed out here in a slightly different context, the assertion is flawed and foundering.

In order to not bring a derisive laugh to my lips, Erickson must answer for

• The Brooks Brothers riot. Intimidation of vote-counters is not part of the definition of democracy, last I checked. Does Erickson have a new definition? (Does the extreme left?)
• Bush v Gore, in which the conservative leaning SCOTUS shockingly stopped the Florida count prior to completion, thus handing Bush Florida, and the Presidential Election.
• The 2000 Presidential Election, which, via the electorate, Gore won, 50,999,897 to 50,456,002 votes, not Bush.
• The dereliction of duty of Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who led the successful effort to ignore President Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to SCOTUS for a year, purely as a political power play, while ignoring his historically decreed duty to officially contemplate the nomination in a timely manner. Cough cough.
• The 2016 Presidential Election, which, via the electorate, Clinton beat Trump, 65,853,514 to 62,984,828. Hell, that’s not even close, dude.
• I’ll skip the Senate representative imbalance, as that takes time to track down and calculate, and I am aware that the Senate was a compromise between the small States and the larger States of the original thirteen, so it could be argued that it’s … just. Or fair. Or something. Anyways, I’m a working dude and don’t have time to tease out all the counts and nuances.

Shall we tote up the damages of Erickson’s flawed concept of democracy?

• President Bush, minority President only through the thumb of SCOTUS on the balance of justice, appointed Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito. Both are still on the bench, and while sometimes Roberts shows some responsibility, that may actually be just him trying to show that the Court is non-partisan. Alito authored the Dobbs opinion, which overturns Roe v Wade. Would Gore have appointed either? Doubtful.
• President Trump, minority President through the ridiculous quirks of the Electoral College, Russian interference, and HRC’s incompetence at campaigning, appointed Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. They each, during nomination hearings, claimed Roe v Wade was “settled law.” They each voted to shitcan Roe v Wade. Now, it could be argued that, if Clinton had been sitting in the Oval Office, Justice Anthony Kennedy would not have retired; then again, we could also argue that he would voted to retain Roe. Unless he speaks out (has he?), I guess we’ll never know on either issue.

That’s five Republican-nominated judges that, in a democracy, would have been Democratically nominated. That doesn’t guarantee they’d have been confirmed; the wailing over Kavanaugh and Barrett by the left would be as nothing compared to the right facing a 6-3 liberal majority on SCOTUS. Erickson predicted riots over Barrett, which never occurred. What if it had been Brown to make the sixth liberal on the Court?

How much gunfire would she and her bodyguards have to endure from a violent right-wing?

So the point is that Erickson’s trying to justify that the right has played by the rules, when they’ve actually played fast & loose by the rules. Indeed, he may realize that, as his next paragraph is this:

They argued for a cause the elite in this country hate. Even a lot of Republicans who gave them lip service privately thought the pro-life movement stood no chance and so they could be humored to no effect. But they won.

Note the appeal to Christian victimhood. It function as a distraction, a reminder that Christians are forever being victimized and must hang together always and forever, or those demonic liberals might get power and do something, like eating all those unwanted fetuses. Which seems unlikely to me, but maybe not to his audience.

And certainly not let his audience think about what he’s saying. It’s all about stirring up the feelings of allegiance with repulsion for the enemy, and it’s no way to honestly explore a topic.

So? Here’s a graph I’ve been meaning to use:

Source: Gallup

Yeah, that’s rather brutal, isn’t it? And it’s from before Dobbs. It’s reflective of a series of Republican maneuvers, rulings, and attitudes that have been ill-chosen since, well, the nomination of Alito, I suppose. Will it fall further? I don’t think Gallup is planning to redo the poll prior to the November elections, although they might.

So what comes next? Oddly enough, I’m thinking of the 18th Amendment, better known as the Prohibition Amendment, which was later overturned by the 21st Amendment. Comparing the overturn of Roe to Prohibition is a dicey proposition, at least for the literal minded: one banned ingestion of a substance known to cause harm, both physically and socially, while Roe removed a ban on a medical procedure.

But I think the actions of banning alcohol ingestion and stripping away a Constitutional right have some important similarities. Both were implemented by self-righteous minorities who would do anything to achieve their goal, from chasing drunks around with an axe, assuming a moral high ground of uncertain stability, to putting political hacks on SCOTUS through deeply un-American maneuvering. Neither set of advocates realized how much damage they did to their arguments and organizations by attaining these goals: the Temperance Movement, as a political force, is spent, even dissolved, and although calls for moderation in drinking continue to exist, actual banning is not even on the political horizon. Similarly, even as today’s political right achieves its goals, it’s dissolving, as individuals are driven away by the ethically and morally dubious actions of leaders as diverse as Senator McConnell, former President Trump, the entire SBC leadership, every Republican running for office under the pennant of “election-denier,” and all the power-hungry hacks who, upon acquiring that power, will misuse it, to the disgust of their erstwhile compatriots.

The Republicans have demonstrated the quicksand-like consistency of their moral systems, from Erickson’s omission of key facts in order to justify the overturning of Roe, to Senator McConnell’s certainty that the goal, and only the goal, matters. That’s not how the American people have functioned in the past, and not how they’ll function now and in the future. Means matter, vitally.

I expect we’ll have to endure a couple of years of a patchwork of bans. In some States, local prosecutors will refuse to enforce anti-abortion laws, while in others, substandard prosecutors will execute their conception of the law with little regard to the actual law, or to societal comity.

Americans will tire of stories of women dying because of the misdeeds of legislatures and governors, and one day they’ll rise up, go to the ballot boxes, and a whole lot of Republican legislators in Republican states will howl about stolen elections.

SCOTUS members can leave the Court in three ways: passing away, retirement, and impeachment. Two of those in any combination will be sufficient for SCOTUS to be liberal again, and then we can anticipate a case tailored to permit the majority to resurrect Roe.

And what’s to keep the Republicans from trying to do the same? Republican and independent voters putting their feet down and telling them NO. And I think that’s what will happen.

Asteroseismology:

Asteroseismology is the study of oscillations in stars. Stars have many resonant modes and frequencies, and the path of sound waves passing through a star depends on the speed of sound, which in turn depends on local temperature and chemical composition. Because the resulting oscillation modes are sensitive to different parts of the star, they inform astronomers about the internal structure of the star, which is otherwise not directly possible from overall properties like brightness and surface temperature. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Gaia telescope’s new map of the Milky Way will let us rewind time,” Alex Wilkins, NewScientist (18 June 2022):

One particular type of tsunami-like vibration that changes a star’s shape, known as a starquake, was detected on some stars when it shouldn’t have been possible according to current theories. “Gaia is opening a goldmine for ‘asteroseismology’ of massive stars,” said Conny Aerts at KU Leuven in Belgium in an ESA statement.

From last week, I think.

Via Mashable, Logically has a report on just how easy it is to scam in the cryptocurrency industry – and why you need to be careful:

Logically’s detailed report follows just how these crypto scams played out on the Stellar blockchain. Stellar, a network like Bitcoin or Ethereum, allows anyone to create their own tokens in “5 easy steps.” The QAnon influencers would create scam tokens and then transfer their holdings out for real money or more establish cryptocurrency after telling their followers to invest. This is commonly known as a “rug pull” in the crypto space. The tokens were created under the domain name “Indus.Gold,” and the QAnon influencers would tell their followers that the crypto was backed by a real New York bank with a similar name. In fact, many of the scam cryptocurrencies followed a similar naming pattern in order to make them sound connected to an actual real company. Logically found that none of these tokens had any connections to the companies they were named after.

For example, Sungold token, which was pitched to their followers as being “backed by a Kazakh gold mine,” was supposedly “linked” to a Russian company of the same name. Logically could not find any information to back this claim up. This scam, however, netted the QAnon influencers approximately $2 million according to Logically.

But rather than focus on cryptocurrencies and what appears to be their inherent dangers, I’d like to shift focus – your’s and mine – to this term influencers. These are people that have found they can sway portions of their viewers’ judgments, and whether for good or ill is not unbalanced.

That is, that they can sway their audience’s judgment, or more to the point yours’, has little to no connection as to whether it’ll improve your life, or degrade it. I’d love to be able to say, This is the problem with social media, but quite honestly this sort of problem has existed from time immemorial. Human beings follow leaders, take their suggestions/orders, and imitate them as a survival behavior.

But leaders and influencers are not, by virtue of their position, uh, virtuous, now are they? That subspecies that is out for its own benefit and will rubbish the lot of you is known as grifters, scammers, scam artists, and a few other terms of approbation.

Social influencers, such as those mentioned in the above article, as well as other, more old-school influencers such as Gwyneth Paltrow, proprietor of Goop, or Jimmy Baker, former televangelist and, more recently, shiller of various fake meds, have surprisingly little to base their claim to being influencers to their names, or, as one famous, late author put it, They’re selling their jawbone, more or less. Paltrow works in the field of New Age products, while Bakker is from the older field of religious hucksterism. Neither field has produced much in the way of positive social influencers.

And, it appears, Internet-based social influencers, often hiding behind pseudonyms, have their share – and perhaps it’s a majority share – of influencers out to scam a buck, rather than give good advice.

I know that nearly everyone looks for that role model, that source of good advice about a world that can be puzzling and frustrating. My advice is to be careful. To examine thoughtfully such advice. To ping it with adversarial questions, even if only in your own mind. To find ways to peek behind the curtain, examine that advice’s construction.

And to do that with all the social influencers, on and off of the Internet.

Here it is from old Gallup:

Younger, Liberal Americans Least Likely to Believe in God

Belief in God has fallen the most in recent years among young adults and people on the left of the political spectrum (liberals and Democrats). These groups show drops of 10 or more percentage points comparing the 2022 figures to an average of the 2013-2017 polls.

Which is no surprise. The bad behaviors exhibited on the right, such as grifting, promoting theocracy, indulging in mendacity and deceptions at the highest levels of the judiciary in order to secure funding of religious institutions and doctrines, and much more of which I’m undoubtedly not aware, makes it easy for the youth, who have not yet made major intellectual and moral investments in the idea of a Divinity, to back away and reconsider the whole proposition of a Divinity, much less a Manifest Destiny, white supremacy, and a bunch of other unmoored ideas.

Some of this will apply to the Left as well, as absolutely no one should escape scrutiny, but, while there are missteps, they are not as egregious, obvious, and sleazy as those on the right.

They keep putting us in the same trivial, bad roles!

Bloodlust! (1961) brings forth Dr. Balleau, perhaps damaged by “the war,” unspecified, who has a passion for hunting. To this end, he has bought an island and populated it with various wild animals, the taxidermied specimens of which adorn the walls of his spacious homes.

And so do some rather more exotic critters, if you know where to look.

Four young people, two lasses and their courters, go out on a boat tour, and the boat’s captain drinks himself into oblivion. They take a dinghy to an island they sight and wander around a bit, until one of them falls into a traditional man-trap. Soon enough, Dr. Balleau shows up, and they are conveyed to his palatial estate.

One thing leads to another, and the good bad Doctor decides he has uses for all of his new guests: the ladies, the usual, while the gentlemen are to be … hunted. The young people have put their spare time to good use, and discovered the lab where he preserves his exotic prey.

It’s not a pretty sight. But they get a hint as to what’s coming.

Well, mediocre acting and a distinctly vicious temperament lead to the usual dashing about in the dark, double crossing, and … well … it should be exciting.

It’s boring.

Repetitious and stilted dialog, marching stereotypes, and a generally sleazy atmosphere offset the psychological flaws and scenery chewing on offer, and in the end it feels a bit like a waste of time.

But your mileage may vary.

An additional observation of the fifth televised hearing has occurred to me, which I have not seen otherwise addressed, and that’s this:

There’s all this mention of pardons, and yet many of those desiring said pardons were left destitute of a pardon on January 20th, 2021, when Biden was inaugurated.

What’s going on?

It’s necessary to remember that Trump is a bully, narcissist, and wannabe mob boss. The most valuable people he knows are those that are dependent on him. Most often, it’s because they’ve criminally blundered and are staring at a possibility of prison, dishonor, and/or loss of wealth.

Keep in mind that, once a pardon is awarded, it cannot be taken back.

So Trump doles them out sparingly. He reasons that no one else can or will save these applicants, so by showing he’ll give them out, such as to former Sheriff Arpaio, who’s too old to really be of service to Trump, he reminds the others that they’d better be prepared to jump really, really high to get the tuna pardon. Through this mechanism, he extracts maximum value from the pardons.

He takes risks, of course, but that’s just part of the game.

A clumsy effort, about average for Trump’s fourth-rate group of sycophants.

In this case, he keeps teasing the chance that he’ll run again for the Presidency. And maybe he will, although I personally doubt it. But so long as he can tease these dependencies that they can yet win pardons, perhaps pardons for any damn thing they might have done, they’ll keep leaping out of the water as high as they can go.

Because that’s how corruption works.

Since the last update …

• Wisconsin Senator Johnson (R) was apparently involved in the January 6th insurrection in that he was asked to deliver two slates of fake electors to VP Mike Pence (R) during the ceremonial count. A Pence aide told Johnson’s aide to not make the delivery. When asked about this on Wednesday, Johnson pretended he was on his phone. How this will affect the general election remains to be seen.
• Also in Wisconsin, the previously mentioned large number of GOP challengers to Senator Johnson in the primary have shrunk to one, Doug Schroeder. Some test polling by Marquette University indicates Johnson is down by only modest amounts to the most likely winners of the Democratic primary.
• In Missouri, candidate and disgraced former governor Eric Greitens’ lead in the Republican Senate primary has the Republican leadership thoroughly spooked, to the extent that they’re trying to sabotage it. Which is not unprecedented, I feel sure. I think the part the Republican leadership is missing is that someday soon, due to the toxic team culture they’ve long engendered, they’ll be replaced by Greitens lookalikes.
• Congress has managed to pass a modest gun bill. Its significance for the Senate elections? Now Republicans cannot be credibly accused of ignoring the deaths of children in favor of their ideology, or so they think. It’s important to note that of the fifteen Republican Senators who voted for the bill, only two, Young of Indiana and Murkowski of Alaska, are up for reelection, and of these two, only Murkowski is running a real risk. Four of the thirteen remaining Senators are retiring at the end of this Congress, which I believe is all the Republicans who are retiring, and so they’re not endangering their careers. The remaining nine face, at worst, a delayed reaction in two+ or four+ years, unless the extreme step of a recall is orchestrated by the far-right gun rights absolutists. Those Republicans who voted NO and are up for reelection will face uncomfortable questions over the matter, as will Young and Murkowski over their YES votes, and the importance of that will vary from State to State.
• With regards to those Republicans voting YES on the gun bill, it may be worth tracking their political donations over the next few years to see if there’s any impact.
• Roe v Wade was overturned. While I haven’t, and won’t, read the opinion, because I’m tired of being irritated with Alito’s broken logic from last time, I will note that conservatives are trying to calm the waters. I don’t know if it’s working, but after reading Erickson’s piece (partial – I won’t listen to him) and O. Carter Snead’s forced, shallow piece, I doubt many pro-choicers will be convinced. But it may have quite some impact on some close Senate races if non-political independents who normally don’t vote are so infuriated that they turn out and vote. This may or may not show up in polling, and it may simply not occur. But there is potential.

This WaPo article was fascinating for what it didn’t consider. First, the flagrant flag flying:

On the morning the House Jan. 6 committee held its second public hearing, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was across town, echoing an instruction he has repeatedly given fellow Republicans: Ignore it.

Speaking to donors gathered at the Georgetown Four Seasons, McCarthy instead recommended Republicans talk about other issues that could help them regain the majority in both chambers of Congress, according to people familiar with the meeting, such as the soaring inflation rate and record-high gas prices — all under Democrats’ watch.

While most rank-and-file members in the Republican House conference have heeded his direction, another influential Republican has tuned into every hearing and has grown increasingly irate — to “the point of about to scream at the TV,” according to a close adviser — with what he views as the lack of defense by his Capitol Hill allies.

That being Trump, of course.

The thing about Trump and McCarthy is that they have history. On January 6th, McCarthy was reportedly angry and frightened and ready to put a knife in Trump’s back. More recently, Trump has been gloating over McCarthy’s rolling over and kissing his feet.

Could McCarthy’s “mistake” be an exceedingly nasty revenge? Corporations, faced with a quarterly loss, will often pile all sorts of bad financial things into that quarter on the theory that one really bad quarter is often forgotten by investors if the following quarters are much better.

Similarly, McCarthy may be trying to pile all the bad shit on Trump and a small coterie of his malignant adherents, such as Clark and Gaetz and all that crew, before setting the boat on fire and pushing it out to sea.

OK, probably not. I don’t take McCarthy as being that smart, that gutsy.

But there is a fascinating congruency. Maybe I’ve misjudged McCarthy.

As public polls indicate American citizens are becoming more and more inclined to prosecute former President Trump for his activities aimed at overturning the 2020 Presidential election, on the right, which I’ve admittedly avoided of late, there seems to a concerted effort to dissemble and distract. Erick Erickson, one of the leading pundits, had this to say today, in the context of President Obama’s premature Nobel Prize and Trump’s Abrahamic Accords:

Today, you can call Israel from Dubai, learn about Israel in books in Dubai’s libraries, and now fly to Israel from Dubai.

This would not have happened but for Donald Trump. He deserves a Nobel Peace Prize.

A false equivalence, of course. While I felt Obama’s prize^[1] was, at best, premature, it would have been more accurate to have given it to the American people for voting a war-mongering Party out of office – and that may have been the real message, sotto voce.

Meanwhile, I note that the situation in the Middle East is quite fluid and may have come to the point where dropping existential enmity made sense. Too, there are other possible factors to consider, such as out and out bribery.

Back on point, Erickson wants to keep his base stirred up and not paying attention to the disaster happening in their own philosophical backyard, so the news of the overturning of Roe v Wade drew this response:

It is official. The United States Supreme Court, with an opinion written by Justice Alito, has ended the terror of Roe v Wade, sending the issue back to the several states.

My bold. Oh, the horror of women controlling their own bodies. But he’s not done yet with the mad distractions:

Democrats keep screaming that Republicans are fascists who want to destroy America. They keep encountering an issue that should give them pause.

In the January 6 hearings, in society, in the polling — there are a lot of Republicans who have moved on from Trump or never liked Trump and they’d still vote for him over them. There are a lot of Republicans who don’t think 2020 was stolen and who condemn what happened on January 6, but they’d still vote Trump over Democrats. But Democrats have never been willing to self-reflect and wonder what about them makes so many reject them. [And then off to his radio broadcast, which I skipped.]

I’ve written about the problems of the Democrats before, but to this I can only say this: Yet, these Didn’t like Trump, never will Republicans still voted for him, supported him, and refused to recognize his many failures. And now many MAGAites are the nominees of the Republicans for the November election for many positions as the Republican continues to accelerate to the right.

And extremist and disgraced Eric Greitens is positioned to win the Missouri nomination for the open Senate seat for Missouri.

Erickson is frantically trying to separate the Republican base from the cesspool that is Trump, because if he acknowledges that the culture of evangelicals, gun rights absolutists, out and out paranoiacs, and endemic distrust of liberals, who happen to be fellow Americans, that is the foundation of the conservative movement, in combination with the culture of toxic team politics of the Republicans, then he’s acknowledging that the conservative movement is a toxic, dead-end philosophy. And that might break the movement. Well, not because of little old Erickson – but he would be another brick falling out of the wall.

So he’s avoiding giving the hearings any credence, as it appears everyone else on the right is doing. Last night’s Fox News review of yesterday’s hearing boiled down to Nothing new, very dull.

I found the hearing fascinating, myself.

¹ Obama’s Nobel was for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples“. Notably, at least one clip of his acceptance speech could be read as a rebuke of the Nobel Committee, whether he meant it that way or not.

The fifth televised meeting of the Panel went over material with which I was mostly familiar: the story at the DoJ in the days after the election was done and the votes counted, involving the tawdry and possibly illegal actions of the former President. The following points came to mind as I watched:

• The three witnesses, Acting AG Rosen, Deputy AG Donoghue, and Assistant AG Engel, were outstanding advocates for the DoJ, both then and now. They communicated its mission and operational requirements, and why Trump’s frantic attempts to corrupt it were intolerable.
• Midway through, it became clear that the Trump, his allies, and his minions were, and are, a pack of fourth-raters, going up against first raters.
• While it was never a mystery why senior Trump Administration officials have complained that they can’t find the jobs that are normally available to former staffers of their seniority, this really threw into vivid relief why they can’t – fourth-raters, and that’s what many of them turn out to be, are not desired by top law, lobbying, and other firms with a stake in the business of Washington. Trump promised the best and delivered mediocrity. I expect that their counterparts in the House and Senate will have similar problems when they leave, or are thrust out of, Congress: Gaetz, Cawthorn, Greene, Gohmert, Biggs, Gosar, and many others show all the signs. My bet is they’ll start their own firms and scratch a living off their reputation as former members of Congress, but do nothing significant.

I’m looking forward to the next hearing.

BTW, there was news today that Jeffrey Clark, a former Assistant AG who was amenable to Trump’s plans in return for promotion to AG, had his home searched today by the FBI.

Keep in mind that the Panel has no authority to order such a search. The FBI is an arm of the DoJ, not Congress.

That means AG Garland, or FBI Director Wray, is paying attention and managed to convince a judge to OK the necessary paperwork to conduct such a search. The news on this should be very interesting. How long will we have to wait for its disclosure? I don’t know.

I’ve been thinking for a week about Andrew Sullivan’s contention that

But this complexity misses something important — the contingent importance of individuals in human history. And the truth is: we would not be where we are now without Donald Trump, and Donald Trump alone. He is unique in American history, a president who told us in advance he would never accept any election result that showed him losing, and then proved it. He tried to overturn the transfer of power to his successor by threats and violence. No president in history has ever done such a thing — betrayed and violated the core of our republic — from Washington’s extraordinary example onwards. The stain of Trump is as unique as it is indelible.

Without wishing to mitigate the guilt of the former President, I must point out that it takes two to tango, that without a receptive audience the former President, well, he’d just be Donald J. Trump, strongly disliked by most of his hometown of Manhattan, and probably known as a screaming nincompoop.

In other words, the training of the conservative base to accept the baseless contentions of the former President, from Crime is at a terrible peak! to All the elections I lose are rigged! to Migrant caravans of rapists!, the willingness to swallow such ludicrous claims without limit, it’s all an indictment of a civil society that failed to properly bring these people to political maturity, and thus an indictment of that segment of society vulnerable to these depredations.

Before someone mutters Your political maturity may be my political brainwashing, a position I understand and respect, I believe that such a position cannot be maintained in the face of the spectacle, the avalanche of evidence illustrating the absolute credulousness of this segment, from sources such as the televised hearings of the January 6th panel to the egregious behavior of many state GOP parties, such as my neighboring State’s, the exceptionally clownish and embarrassing Wisconsin GOP. We can list everything from the endless grifting, much like H. Ross Perot’s Endless sucking noise, but into the wallets of the deeply dishonest Donald “No, there’s no Election Defense Fund” Trump and his allies, the lies, all the way to Every Single Believer in the Prophetic Movement.

These are the American citizens who’ve abandoned common sense, who’ve harassed anyone who stood in their path to power, and have forgotten what brought them freedom and prosperity: democracy.

And they, moreso than Donald J. Trump, are the biggest threats to the United States of America, because without dynamite, the match to the fuse is nothing more than some amusing sparks.

This nomination is a bit shocking, as it’s January 6th insurrection witness “Rusty” Bowers, Speaker of the Arizona House, who described being asked to cheat (and refusing), and how his family and his terminally ill daughter were physically harassed by Trumpists. You have to wonder if he was gelded or something.

“If he is the nominee, if he was up against Biden, I’d vote for him again,” Bowers said. “Simply because what he did the first time, before COVID, was so good for the county. In my view it was great.” [AP]

If it was that great then why was Trump dismissed overwhelmingly by the voters? And he doesn’t appear to be paying all that much attention to Trump’s impact on the country, does he?

If I’d only waited a day for the June 21st primaries to complete. Sigh….

• In Alabama, Katie Britt defeated crushed Rep Mo Brooks in the Republican primary runoff yesterday. Britt has former President Trump’s endorsement, but quite possibly only because Trump despises Rep Brooks for a social faux-pas of a comment he made in connection with the January 6th insurrection investigation. Minus a scandal or black swan event, or perhaps Brooks shrieking about election rigging, Britt should easily defeat the Democratic candidate, Will Boyd, and Alabama will continue to have a far-right Senator.
• Senator Crapo (R) of Idaho will be facing David Roth (D), who appears to have little political experience and little chance of winning. This was determined back in May and I was just a bit flippant about Democratic chances in Idaho. I fear I remain flippant.
• North Carolina’s Beasley-Budd race has a poll I missed yesterday, as WRAL/SurveyUSA’s poll from a week or so ago shows Beasley up by 4 points, 44% to 40%, the first lead for the former NC Supreme Court Justice. How much of this is Trump’s, Biden’s, or the candidate’s influence is difficult to tell. It has to be encouraging for the Democrats of North Carolina, in any case, and should give them some impetus.

There, all caught up. Yeah, sure I am.

I finally got around to taking a look at this year’s Texas GOP’s party platform. I couldn’t finish it, as it struck me not as a coherent document – and, to be honest, I’ve never read one of these before, so perhaps coherence isn’t a virtue in these things – so much as a litany of personal grievances, dressed up in lawyer language and never really discussed. For example, Section 46:

46. Energy Production: We support free–market solutions and immediate removal of government barriers and direct subsidies to the production, transportation, reformulation, refining, and distribution of energy. We oppose federally directed plans and proposals that favor renewable energy sources that may constitute a nuisance, or otherwise have a substantially negative impact on neighboring landowners, including harming property values of our neighborhoods, farms, and ranch areas.

I can’t help but notice how they ignore the dangers in such installations. Government direction of just such regulations keep farms and ranches safe. Or, despite their advocacy of unfettered free market principles, is Section 72.

72. Personal Data Privacy: We demand that all rights to privacy that individuals have in their homes should be extended to all digital data via the use of strong public key encryption technologies. We call upon Texas to prohibit vendors of the State of Texas and its subdivisions from selling or sharing data captured in providing services to Texans. We support laws limiting the ways in which internet providers, electronic applications, websites, schools, government entities, and others may access the electronic communications or documents of all Texans.

Since I don’t have a benchmark, it’s hard to render a really fair judgment. But I just have to say this just strikes me as something a bunch of fourth-raters would put out. In particular, I noticed that the word fetus was verboten, in favor of the ridiculous pre-born human. With no mention of the woman’s health or desires; she’s apparently just a baby crib with legs rather than wheels.

But they yelled at Senators Cornyn (R-TX) and Cruz (R-TX), so that’s a point in their favor.

For those who keep mumbling that Biden’s to blame for gas prices because of dad-gum this and dad-gum that, including Erick Erickson and other right-wing attack dogs – I can’t bring myself to write pundit – this WaPo article on the refining industry may be a real eye-opener. First quote:

“I don’t think you are ever going to see a refinery built again in this country,” Chevron CEO Michael Wirth said in an interview with The Washington Post this month.

“It’s been 50 years since we built a new one,” Wirth said. “In a country where the policy environment is trying to reduce demand for these products, you are not going to find companies to put billions and billions of dollars into this.”

That’s a shocker. We – or at least I – never hear how much it costs to build and operate a refinery. And then there’s that thing called maintenance:

In the absence of any offers, LyondellBasell plans to shut its 700-acre operation on the Gulf Coast no later than the end of next year. Quitting the refining business, the company said in a statement, “is the best strategic and financial path forward.” The company did not comment on industry speculation that a fire that knocked part of its century-old Houston facility offline last week may push the closure date even sooner, as LyondellBasell faces the prospect of costly repairs.

The facility refines about 264,000 barrels of crude oil per day.

“These are aging physical plants where steel needs to be replaced, equipment needs to be overhauled, new pumps maybe needed,” said Ed Hirs, an energy economist at the University of Houston.

“Just getting the equipment you need could take three years….”

Even the pro-fossil fuel Trump Administration could not persuade the industry to keep refineries open. It’s not so much electric vehicles themselves as the ratio of profit to cost is so small, and the magnitude of cost is so large, as to render the equation existentially dangerous to the companies involved. Add in the cost of accidents, including their fiery, explosive nature:

A 38,000-pound fragment of the plant was hurled across the river by the explosion. Nobody was killed, but 3,271 pounds of highly toxic hydrofluoric acid leaked into the community.

And the entire refining industry is distinctly unappetizing. It leaves me actively wondering how solar and wind power compare for future maintenance and expansion. Wind is fairly easy, as putting up a windmill isn’t a new technology, and I don’t think there’s a great deal of toxic waste to worry about, once the blades are built. They do need a bit of grease, though, and regular maintenance. Too bad about your views, millionaires, but it’s this or lights out.

Solar I’m less certain. And nuclear has some immense costs which must be brought down.

That article is something of an eye-opener.