Monthly Archives: August 2022

It’s long been said in American politics that the third, fatal rail of politics is Social Security, because stirring up the old folks over their income will end your political career, and very quickly. Fear the people with walkers, eh? Something I read by Professor Richardson reminded me of that, and of what I think may be the future extension of this old aphorism:

While Biden is consolidating and pushing the Democrats’ worldview, the Republicans are in disarray. The revelation that former president Trump moved classified intelligence to the Trump Organization’s property at Mar-a-Lago has kept some of them sidelined, as they didn’t want to talk about the issue, and has forced others to try to justify an unprecedented breach of national security. Republican candidates for elected office who are not in deep red districts have been taking references to Trump (and to abortion restrictions) off their websites.

My amused bold. And, yes, you guessed it: the former President becomes the new third rail of politics. His divisive message and disregard for the law, much less norms of government, are just the beginning. His grasping, boastful, mean-spirited, self-centered ways, and his disregard for the value of simple truth will be perceived as deeply un-American, even by those Americans who have these character failings in abundance. These latter will scent the wind and adjust their sails accordingly.

And if Trump is accused by law enforcement of selling those government documents found at Mar-a-Lago to national adversaries? The amount of juice in our proverbial rail will go up by a magnitude. The only mention of Trump by American politicians will be as a synonym for failure and adherence to his Me! Me! Me! ideology, and that doesn’t work well with government, which is about helping out the people.

But let’s take this a step further: What happens if Chad Bauman did get this right and it’s all about Trump’s upbringing in a prosperity church? That the apparent madness of his repeated calls that he be restored to the Presidency, despite his manifest electoral loss as well as his  profound failure as a President, are the Name it and Claim it magical invocation of some Divine entity? Yes, that is his wand sputtering.

Consequently, and fortunately for us, we may see some holes in our cultural landscape where prosperity churches used to exist. Some may disappear, while others drastically shrink. Some prosperity church leaders – I hesitate to call them pastors or bishops or whatever title they’ve awarded themselves – will desperately try to keep the grift going, while others will head out to foreign lands to enjoy their gains. A few may meet untimely ends at the hands of angry followers.

And a lot of folks who lack Trump’s mental instability but are still burdened with the prosperity church teachings will need help.

And, meanwhile, this graph will continue its trend:

Source: Gallup

Evangelicals had celebrated Trump as Cyrus of the Bible, striding from its pages into their lives. It’s not looking that way now, and if I were them I’d have a chat about getting rid of the Biblical respect for Cyrus, who, as I understand it, is the guy who did bad things that benefited Christians, and so hey he’s blessed.

Remember Amanda “I’m Trump in heels!” Chase (R-VA)? She may be changing to flats.

Inter alia:

Adverb

1. – among other things [Legal Dictionary]

Noted in “Should Uncle Sam Worry About ‘Foreign’ Open-Source Software? Geographic Known Unknowns and Open-Source Software Security,” Dan Geer, John Speed Meyers, Jacqueline Kazil, Tom Pike, Lawfare:

We then used an open-source tool called GitGeo to analyze the contributors to packages and to predict, when possible, the country in which the developer resides. The GitGeo tool makes this prediction by using these developers’ GitHub profiles, a page similar to a Facebook profile where developers can optionally provide their location information, inter alia. We first look at the top 100 contributors to each package and then redo our analysis using only the top 10. “Contributors” to a package are those users who make changes to the package (that is, adding or subtracting code). The more changes an open-source software developer makes to a package, the arguably more central that developer is to the continued maintenance, health, and security of that package. Figure 1 displays the four graphs that resulted from this analysis. Each column of each graph represents one open-source software package and the stacked bar graph colors represent the different locations of developers associated with that package.

For those still wondering about supply chain issues, there are of course long-term questions, such as shortening those chains and whether or not the government needs to take action, or if the companies have taken sufficient warning from getting their fingers singed during the pandemic.

And then there’s the short-term question: is it fixed yet?

Here’s gCaptain with some evidence:

The number of container ships headed for the California ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach — a traffic jam that once symbolized American consumer vigor during the pandemic — declined to the lowest level since the bottleneck started to build two years ago.

Eight vessels were in the official queue as of late Monday, according to data from the Marine Exchange of Southern California & Vessel Traffic Service Los Angeles and Long Beach. That’s an all-time low, officials said in a statement, down from a record of 109 set in January and about 40 lined up a year ago. …

Though officials changed the way inbound ships queued in November 2021 — having them slow-steam across the Pacific rather than bunching them at anchor near the ports — the dwindling count reflects a slowdown in consumer demand, ample inventories built up by American companies, and ships rerouting through Gulf of Mexico and East Coast ports.

I suspect slow-steam will generate a little less pollution and lower fuel consumption, but probably not to any great extent.

And it distorts any claim  that supply issues are fixed, at best. There’s been progress, but it’s not fixed in my mind.

Putin’s War in a time-series map.

Reaching a grim six-month milestone: Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in an animated map. pic.twitter.com/BuSiZsgugf

— UkraineWorld (@ukraine_world) August 26, 2022

I like it, and I hope its successors show Russia being pushed out of Ukraine in the near future.

And so, presumably, is the rest of the Trump-wing of the conservatives, although I haven’t the time to explore. Erickson’s latest is a devious defense of the former President and his boxes of goodies, devious because Erickson hardly mentions the former President at all.

Instead, he goes after social media sites, claiming – and maybe he’s right – most social media sites are biased against conservatives, but even that’s a head feint. For those who’ve been watching national scandals for years, his final target is unsurprising: the bastion of conservatism, the FBI.

Why?

Because the FBI is the current greatest threat to Trump. They’ve found, with the help of the National Archives, that he took documents with him when he was kicked out of office by the voters, and some of those documents are Top Secret – or worse. He lied on a response to a subpoena. He’s alleged to have demanded all the documents back, that they’re his and not the government’s, all in violation of settled Federal law on the matter.

And, of course, there’s the Why of the matter. Not Why did the FBI investigate, but the Why did Trump take – perhaps, more accurately, steal – those documents? The man’s allegedly a billionaire, so it seems unlikely he’d be peddling them to potential customers. And the American capitalist system is the source of Trump’s prestige and power, so it’s hard to see his destroying that in some haze of hatred. Right?

But what if Chad Bauman is right? That Trump thinks, if you’ll excuse my macabre sense of humor, all that matters is He Who Dies Richest Wins?

That would certainly explain pilfering important documents for later sale to the highest bidder. And not caring about the future, given his age. And, no doubt, a number of other puzzling issues.

But as Erickson attacks the liberals and Twitter, he has a slip up. I don’t know if it’s him or if someone told him to write to a collection of talking points, but it’s the sort of slip up that makes it easy not to take him seriously.

TikTok is a Chinese intelligence operation wherein the Chinese harness woke Americans to induce our children into transgender surgeries, all while compiling a facial recognition database. It is the most dangerous social media site on the planet. Americans have allowed their children to be willing users of a Chinese surveillance system.

That entire last sentence implies that “Americans” have full knowledge of TikTok: its owners, goals, and internal policies.

And they don’t.

Persuasion is too often treated as a big chess game, where the moves and configuration of the chessboard are known at all times, and those performing the argument are boning for a position of superiority over their opponents and their allies: Look at how smart I am and how dumb they are!

But it’s just not so. I doubt 5% of American parents know more about TikTok than that it’s a social media site their kids use. That five percent may know it’s Chinese-owned, but almost none of them are aware of facial-recognition ambitions, since at least Wikipedia is also unaware of them; for all I know, Erickson is indulging a conspiracy theory.

As the far-right chews off its own leg? Nyah, too obvious.

But, conspiracy theory or not, it’s part and parcel of Erickson’s real goal, alienating conservatives from the very FBI which has stood in their corner during the Hoover years, and is often considered to have a conservative leaning, as one expects from law enforcement. It’s sad that he thinks he needs to make this case, but with Trump now in imminent danger of arrest and trial, and – it’s no longer unthinkable – eventual execution, he may think it’s necessary to throw the FBI and its Republican director, Christopher Wray, under the bus.

In the end, though, there’s an unmistakable dodging of responsibility. Trump is, by most accounts liberal and conservative, in trouble up to his neck. As a product of the conservative movement, his condemnation also condemns the movement. But Erickson will have none of it. He’ll blame the FBI, he’ll blame the social media sites, anyone but the conservative movement.

And it’s dishonest not to critically examine the movement’s social dynamics when they can produce and elect to the Presidency such a terminally toxic person as Trump. Erickson’s really embraced his role as a propagandist, hasn’t he? And, being one, it reduces his effectiveness.

We were just plowing the road and this popped up. Honest!

• Madison Horn (D) has secured the Democratic nomination for the Oklahoma Senate seat and will be facing incumbent Senator Lankford (R) in the regularly scheduled Senate contest. My apologies for implying Horn had already won the nomination in the above link, which was false; she actually ended up in what appears to have been an acerbic runoff. Don’t confuse this with the contest to fill the retiring Senator Inhofe’s (R-OK) seat, held at the same time, with Rep Markwayne Mullin (R) vs former Rep Kendra Horn (D). And Madison Horn’s chances? Low, but not zero. Throw us a bone poll!
• Dueling polls in Pennsylvania: A rated Emerson College Polling gives Lt. Governor Fetterman (D) a four point lead over rival Dr. Oz Mehmet (R), 48% – 44%, which is well below the margin most other polls have suggested, and also clashes with The New York Times report that the NRSC has cut bait on the Pennsylvania race. Meanwhile, B/C-rated Franklin and Marshall College Polling has given the Lt. Gov. a nine point lead, 45%-36%,, more in line with other polls. What does it mean? Possibly ideological groups of voters are refusing to answer pollsters, or are answering dishonestly. This has been suggested by Erick Erickson as a reason to distrust polling. And the polls did get the recent New York District 19 special election wrong – but the Democrats won when the Republicans were favored. It’s all still unsettling, though.
• In Missouri Eric Schmitt (R) has an eleven point lead, 49%-38%, over Trudy Valentine (D) according to a poll by Saint Louis University and YouGov. Neither joint-conductor of the poll seems known to FiveThirtyEight, so it’s hard to say how serious this poll should be taken, but Missouri is considered very conservative these days. Valentine has quite a hill to climb, but that was a given going in. The last time a Democrat won a Missouri Senate seat, though, was due to a foot in a pothole having to do with abortion. Will Schmitt follow his predecessor? Will Valentine try to bait him into such a mistake? Stay tuned.
• The Senate Leadership Fund (SLF) is canceling nearly $10 million in Arizona and Alaska ad reservations. This must raise further questions, but exactly their nature is not clear. Why? SLF is controlled by Senator McConnell (R-KY), who may be considered the strongest of the traditional Republicans still in a powerful position, what with the apparent failure of Rep Liz Cheney (R-WY) to gain the nomination of the Wyoming Republicans to her seat. The Arizona nominee is the Trump-endorsee Blake Masters, who has little else beyond that endorsement but whatever financial resources of billionaire Peter Thiel is willing to give him. Trump’s dislike of McConnell may be moving into legendary territory at this point, while I’m not sure about Thiel. We could be seeing an effort by McConnell to drain resources and, eventually, prestige from Trump by withdrawing financial support from a candidate associated with Trump who was doomed from the get-go. And the official explanation? “The McConnell-backed super PAC’s strategic change is in part a reaction to its massive $28 million commitment in Ohio, where GOP nominee J.D. Vance is facing a strong challenge from Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio).” Yes, it would be a major blow to Republican prestige to have not just one, but two, Democratic Senators from the supposedly reddish Ohio. Heck, those voters might learn that Democratic Senators are better than Republicans! McConnell is a tactician, but not a strategist; Trump is just a bum who got lucky once. Their mutual dislike and antagonistic maneuvering could lead to a smoking pile of rubble in the Republican camp come November.
• Yes, Alaska was also mentioned, above. I’ll go with the common wisdom on this one: incumbent Murkowski, McConnell’s endorsee, appears to be easily beating Trump endorsee and extremist Tshibaka, as well as the other two candidates in this ranked choice voting (RCV)-based race, so there’s little point in sending her money. RCV is biased towards moderates, and that’s Murkowski to a T.

Previous snert here.

Good Lord – it’s Pinhead vs. the Mob Boss.

In Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) we’re confronted with a confounding question:

Why did the producers bother?

Oh, sure, there’s big audiences and big money, wherein the latter is incurred in the big budget necessary to render monsters not derived from rubber suits, reportedly ranging from $155-$200 million. There’s gotta be an ego-boost in being told that you put that much money into a movie about a rivalry between an overgrown, supercharged chicken with a grumpy ‘tude and big fucking chimp. Fucking big chimp. However you prefer those overused adjectives ordered, eh?

But it might help to consider the traditional thematics of these two star critters. Gojira (1954) used Godzilla as the vehicle to ask what a society is to do when attacked by the forces of irrationality. Japan had not provoked this attack, at least in this version of reality, and its attempts at defense were dubious at best. Some reviewers narrowed it down to an implicit condemnation of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States, as Godzilla is contaminated with radiation; later stories gave him an actual nuclear heart, whatever that meant. But the terror of being menaced, minus provocation, by a vehicle of indiscriminate destruction made Gojira a true horror tale.

King Kong (1933) is a classic anti-free markets screed, as a corporate head chooses to transport a truly gigantic ape from its isolated island into the very midst of American civilization, all in pursuit of a lot of money; once Kong escapes and kills a few people, he must be exterminated, all while he expresses a slightly creepy affection for a normal sized woman. It attacks at least a couple of American ideals having to do with our favorite obsessions, money and sex, and that made it, along with the poor guy plucked from a tree and eaten by one of Kong’s dinosauroid rivals on the island, a real horror story for the American psyche.

But in Godzilla vs. Kong we have little more than a grudge match between two ancient rivals. Yes, there’s the corporate fellow who may be responsible for this clash in the middle of a city, but his motivation isn’t the crass chase after profits, but rather being the saviour of mankind. Maybe. Or maybe king of the world. He’s not well developed, unlike the hackers who get a role in this because … computers. Important, ya know?

This lack of clearcut connection to the earlier, effective sagas damages this story, leaving the audience to wonder just how much they’ve been taken for. Are they really here because they’re susceptible to the charms of a fight between an overgrown chicken with halitosis and a chimp borrowed from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)? And, maybe, a robot? A telepathic robot?

Or cyborg?

Yeah, it’s just a mess, as sequels often become. It’s flashy enough, but not very sensical. Don’t mortgage your house to see this. It’ll be hard enough on your good sense.

Off in cryptocurrency land, the platform known as Tornado Cash is leading quite a tale of existence. For example, there’s this odd claim:

But the sanctions aimed at Tornado Cash are novel. Tornado Cash is known as a mixer, obscuring the source of digital assets by pooling them together before users withdraw them. It exists as software code on a decentralized, globe-spanning network of computers, and its authors wrote it in such a way that even they can’t edit it. [WaPo]

Can’t even edit it? I sure wish WaPo had gone into a bit more detail on that claim, as it seems extremely unlikely. Perhaps they mean any modifications and the entire platform stops functioning.

But it strikes me as a childish resistance to authority.

“More than anything else right now, we’re an industry that needs guidance,” said Ari Redbord, a former Treasury official now with TRM Labs, which provides crypto companies with tools to monitor fraud and financial crime.

And that strikes me as good a reason as any not to use cryptocurrencies where possible.

The markets have been down a bit of late. Is Bitcoin proving to be a redoubt of value? Here’s the one month chart.

Source: CoinMarketCap.

The answer would appear to be No.

The 3 Day Novel Contest is open again this year, in case you’ve been feeling the itch. Registration is here.

No, I’m not.

Just like everyone else, I stare with wonder…

The Cartwheel Galaxy via JWST. Source NASA/ESA/CSA/STSci.

But we know that JWST is mostly sensitive in the infrared range, which means these images are false in the sense that our eyes wouldn’t see this. Scientists or algorithms select which visible color is mapped to by a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum to which we’re not sensitive.

And what if our understanding of JWST’s instrumentation is defective? Here’s an article from NewScientist (20 August 2022, paywall) on that subject:

When JWST sends data back to Earth, it doesn’t come as complete images. Astronomers have to process it to make it usable, which requires understanding the sensitivity of the telescope’s scientific instruments. As JWST takes more data, we gain a better understanding of that sensitivity. But new information on the performance of an infrared camera caused the telescope’s operators to update its data-processing algorithms in July – well after the first images were released – and this threw some astronomers into a tizzy.

“When the first images came out, it was a bit of an ‘astronomers at Christmas’ scenario with everyone diving in to see what they could find,” said Nathan Adams at the University of Manchester, UK, in a statement. “What I think flew under the radar of a lot of astronomers was a part of that report mentions that NIRCam (one of the main cameras on the telescope) was overperforming in its reddest wavelengths.”

This isn’t nearly as easy as I thought it might be.

Octonion:

In mathematics, the octonions are a normed division algebra over the real numbers, a kind of hypercomplex number system. The octonions are usually represented by the capital letter O, using boldface O or blackboard bold {\displaystyle \mathbb {O} }. Octonions have eight dimensions; twice the number of dimensions of the quaternions, of which they are an extension. They are noncommutative and nonassociative, but satisfy a weaker form of associativity; namely, they are alternative. They are also power associative. [Wikipedia]

That’s opaque, if I may be polite. Noted in “Octonions: The strange maths that could unite the laws of nature,” Michael Brooks, NewScientist (20 August 2022, paywall):

Mathematicians are excited because they reckon that by translating our theories of reality into the language of the octonions, it could tidy up some of the deepest problems in physics and clear a path to a “grand unified theory” that can describe the universe in one statement. “This feels like a very promising direction,” says Latham Boyle at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada. “I find it irresistible to think about.”

Sounds exciting. I wish I had a brain that worked that way.

I’d dust it every day and never let the cat play with it.

Long ago, I recall reading a passage that claimed, truly or not, that the first class people in France went into government, and the first class people in America went into business, thus explaining a lot about both nations.

But when something like this comes up, it’s hard to say the Republicans are leaning into the old aphorism a bit too hard:

Laura Loomer refuses to accept her primary loss and declares "I actually am the Congresswoman in Florida’s 11th District, and everyone knows it," vowing to harass Rep. Dan Webster and "drive him into the ground every step of the way until he collapses in disgrace." pic.twitter.com/HUtyRX18EY

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) August 25, 2022

No, winning a primary is not enough, Mz Loomer. Not even close.

It’s this sort of mentality that really threatens to wreck Democracy. Some of these sorts have lived all their lives busily demanding all they can get without regard to fairness, penalties, or anything else outside of their narcissism. Some have watched the former President’s immoral ways and concluded they can imitate him and make their way to success. And some are just entertaining themselves, never having run into a brick wall before.

And so we end up with this frantic nonsense. No, nobody knows you traveled back in time and beat Webster in 2020, as well as his Democratic opponent, Mz Loomer, and you’ve been working in Congress ever since. Probably because it’s Webster cashing the paychecks.

A reader writes to correct my mistakes regarding the Colorado River – no doubt committed through sleepiness:

A correction to this statement: “In the map above, the olive and turquoise areas serve to illuminate the Colorado River basin, and it’s that area to which the Colorado River provides water.” No, the shaded areas are the areas _drained_ by the Colorado River.

The areas to which it _provides_ water are different, especially a significant amount of the water is pumped _out_ of that basin for use elsewhere. Those include:

• Water captured in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado just west of the continental divide in places like Shadow Mountain Reservoir and Lake Granby which is pumped over the divide to the Denver metro area and used by cities there.
• Water pumped out (I believe from Lake Havasu) and sent westward all the way to the Los Angeles basin to serve cities there.

Some further notes (as someone who has mentioned this disaster in waiting for decades, and who has lived in Colorado, Utah and California):

The vast majority of the water in that river system comes from snow melt, not rain. And most of that comes from snow melt in Colorado and Wyoming. Those other tributaries on the map, like the Salt River in Arizona, are tiny by comparison, although the Salt is also mostly snow melt from Arizona mountains.

And this is not new. But people have been doing everything they can to ignore it or imagine any shortages or droughts were just short-term blips for more than 30 to 40 years. I last visited Lake Mead in about 1974; it was completely full. I have not checked, but it’s likely that at some point shortly after that, it became less than full and has never regained that stature. More than that, historical climate evidence has shown that the period from about 1900 to 1950 was unusually cool, wet and heavy with snowfall for the Colorado basin. That is to say, when the states and the feds were divvying up the Colorado River water for users and guesstimating the future, they were using a baseline that was actually far wetter/plentiful than average. So even a return to average would have been a water shortage. Meanwhile, actual usage went way up (see how Las Vegas and Phoenix have doubled in size in Lake Mead was last full) and climate has not only returned to “average” but gotten drier and warmer.

I plead exhaustion. Old Age. Something bad. I should have recognized that was a drainage basin!

It appears both sides are certain of victory in November, albeit the the right comes from before the special election in New York, while the left comes after. First, the right is represented by my old favorite, Erick Erickson, in a post helpfully entitled Seasonal Polling Disorder is About to Run the Democrats Off a Cliff:

In 2014, Democrats took a lead in the generic ballot in the summer and surged in August. Breathless Washington reporters claimed the GOP was suffering with bad candidates like in 2010 when a GOP wave failed to grab the Senate. Obama had the wind at his back and the ship of state was sailing forward.

In November of 2014, the GOP had a polling average of about 2.4% and the actual election result gave the GOP over a 5% win.

If you go to Real Clear Politics and seek out their generic ballot archive, you’ll see that in August, the Democrats always get a noticeable bump in the polling average at this time of year. There are lots of theories why. My personal theory is that in August, Republicans — the demographic most likely to have large families — are either heading out on last minute vacations before school starts or they are already (as in my family’s case) going back to school and getting into the new school year’s routine. They aren’t talking to pollsters.

And this all means:

In Georgia, in 2014 and 2018, at this time of year, the Republicans were losing to the Democrats in both the gubernatorial and senatorial polling. That makes Kemp’s lead against Abrams right now even more remarkable and suggests a blow out for him in November and suggests a Walker win, despite a media narrative that Walker is too bad a candidate to beat Warnock.

In Pennsylvania, that means Dr. Oz still has a very good chance of winning and it makes J. D. Vance a shoo-in in Ohio and Adam Laxalt the most likely winner in Nevada.

That Erickson thinks – or at least is willing to say – that Walker is facing a malicious narrative rather than what anyone who cares to take the time to check can verify – that he’s badly misinformed at best, and speaks gibberish at worst, speaks to how much of this may be just propaganda to keep the conservatives together for November.

On the left, here’s Rule of Claw on Daily Kos: talking about polls after the special election in New York:

These polls add up to an average of R 7.6. Pat Ryan has won by about four. That is a, gasp, 11.6 miss. Take a look at the DCCC poll. Even that poll had it by 3 for Molinaro, although it showed the race within reach. If we assess this as the most accurate poll, it still missed by 7 points. Point of fact, were we to win seats Trump won by less than five, we would gain 30 in the House. By 7?

Seven is a Blue Tsunami. Now, this was a Biden plus 1.5 district, and an R PVI of 2 overall according to Cook Political Report. But this would still suggest the environment is 6 points more favorable to Democrats than neutral.

I don’t have time to check his or her sources or calculations, but the special election does speak for itself. I’ve been guessing a 10 seat gain for the Democrats in the House this November, but that’s a bit of blind guess based on the special elections in Nebraska and Minnesota, taking the unexpectedly narrow victories for Republicans to mean the independents have recognized extremists in office are a danger to their rights, and possibly even an existential danger.

But it’s interesting to see the clash in interpretations. So far I’d have to say that Erickson’s interpretation, based as it is on his understanding of behavior patterns, is inferior to Rule of Claw’s, which is based more on facts, but can’t account for unseen data.

So we’ll see.

And there’s a king-sized one out on the Sun:

[AR3088], which didn’t even exist yesterday, is inset in this Solar Dynamics Observatory map of magnetic fields on the sun. According to Hale’s Law, the sunspot’s magnetic poles should be arranged +/-, that is, positive (+) on the left and negative (-) on the right. Instead, they are rotated 90 degrees; positive (+) is on top and negative (-) is on the bottom.

This is a rare “perpendicular sunspot,” with magnetic poles orthogonal to the sun’s equator. What’s going on? Something unusual may be happening to the sun’s magnetic dynamo beneath the surface where this sunspot is growing. We’ll keep an eye on AR3088 to see what happens next. [Spaceweather.com]

Something to keep an eye on. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

Yes, more, more. They never stop, do they?

• The final qualifier for the Senate seat race in Alaska is Buzz Kelley (R). In this RCV non-partisan primary, here are the rough numbers: Murkowski (R) 43.7%, Tshibaka (R) 40.4%, Chesbro (D) 6.2%, and Buzz Kelley (R) 2.2%. If Murkowski wins despite the endorsement of Tshibaka by former President Trump and the Alaska Republican Party, will the Party fade into irrelevance? This may be more likely than is first apparent, because the lone Alaskan seat in the US House is currently empty due to the death of the last seatholder, longtime Representative Don Young (R). The special election was held Aug 16th and is currently led by … Democrat Mary Peltola. But a lot of vote counting must still be performed. If Peltola wins the runoff for a couple of months of seat-filling, and then wins the regular election in November, has the Alaskan electorate given the Alaska Republican Party the big waveoff, basically telling the extremists to get out of town?
• The Kansas Reflector has an interview and profile of Kansas candidate Mark Holland (D).
• North Carolina’s contest between Rep Budd (R) and Cheri Beasley (D) is called “a dead heat” by the Civitas Institute, a conservative pollster. Each of the two candidates polled at 42.3%. This organization is not known to FiveThirtyEight, and so evaluating the poll is a bit difficult.
• A Trafalgar poll in Ohio gives J. D. Vance (R) a five point lead over Rep Ryan (D). Trafalgar is rated A- by FiveThirtyEight.
• A rated Fox News gives Lt. Governor Mandela Barnes (D) a 50% – 46% lead over incumbent Senator Ron Johnson (R) in Wisconsin’s Senate race, which is within the margin of error. The consolation prize is that Johnson supporters are more enthused. Apparently, they want to lose their Social Security checks?
• Nevada’s Reno Gazette teams with Suffolk University to produce a poll showing incumbent Senator Masto (D) leading challenger Adam Laxalt (R) 45% – 38%. The last poll I saw gave Masto a three point lead, so this is a problem for Laxalt, who is Trump-endorsed. Suffolk is rated B+ by FiveThirtyEight. Masto appears to be benefiting from the Dobbs decision motivating Democratic voters. Is Masto safe yet? No. Trafalgar has released a poll showing Laxalt leading by three, 47%-44%. I’d wait until Masto, or Laxalt, has a twelve point lead before considering them safe.
• A rated Fox News gives incumbent Senator Kelly (R) of Arizona an eight point lead over Blake Masters (R), a considerable comedown from the fourteen point lead awarded by newcomer pollster Center Street PAC last week. That’ll learn me, darnit. But it’s still a lead outside of the margin of error in a purple state. In other news, though, another Republican+Independent group of forty leaders have announced their support for Kelly rather than Masters.
• It appears Rep Deming (D) has won the right in the primary to challenge Senator Rubio (R) for his seat in the Senate from Florida. The second place finishing Democrat didn’t exceed 10%.
• In Missouri John Wood (I) has ended his candidacy in the wake of Eric Schmitt’s defeat of Eric Greitens in the Senate primary.
• Oklahoma’s Rep Markwayne Mullin (R) will be the Republican’s nominee for the open Oklahoma Senate seat, as the Trump endorsee defeats T. W. Shannon with 65% of the primary vote. Does this signal a crack in the Republican voters? Probably not, but a poll would be welcome.
• In Washington McLaughlin & Associates claims the race between incumbent Murray (D) and challenger Smiley (R) is 49% – 43% for Murray, much tighter than other polls of this race. As I’ve noted before, this pollster is rated “C/D” by FiveThirtyEight, and in another negative note, RealClearPolitics, an aggregator of polls, does not appear to be willing to use this pollster.

A vague gesture of previous report & prediction here.

For those readers who don’t track special elections, a special election to fill an empty Congressional seat is often used to attempt to forecast the next general election for the entire country. Its usefulness depends on the nature of the district, the popularity of the individual candidates although appropriate adjustments can still yield prognosticatory … information.

So there was a special election last night in New York to fill the seat that was emptied by new Governor Hochul (D-NY) selecting Rep Antonio Delgado (D-NY) to be her Lt. Governor. Popular pundit opinion had it that Republican Marc Molinaro should beat Democrat Pat Ryan in a mildly close race.

The results? Ryan beats Molinaro, roughly 51%-49%. That’s stirred up the pundit class.

Marc Molinaro’s (R) On The Issues Summation.

But what does it mean for the November elections? Molinaro’s On The Issues page shows him to be an atypical Republican candidate, favoring abortion rights, and generally a libertarian, rather than what passes for a doctrinaire Republican these days. So this may suggest that the standard Republican base voters walked away from him, at least in part; the fact that he’s a poor match for the standard Republican voter may suggest that this special election is a poor specimen to use for forecasting the November elections.

But it’s also true that a lot of voters will simply see the Republican label and decide to vote against Molinaro, meaning he might have been better served running as a Libertarian! Teasing out the details from an election like this can be a tricky business.

So is this in line with the surprisingly close special elections run in Nebraska and Minnesota over the last few months? It’s probably good advice to both sides not to be complacent. It was fairly close one way instead of the other in New York. More detailed analysis of such factors as new voter registrations is not within my means, so I can’t take it any further.

Doppelgängion:

Here we have a number so ludicrously large that it is tricky to compare with any other numbers: 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 68 corresponds to 1 followed by 100 million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion zeroes.

It is a number I have named the doppelgängion, because it relates to the chances of there being another person like you, a doppelgänger, somewhere else in our universe. To be clear, we aren’t talking about doppelgängers in other universes disconnected from our own, as imagined in the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, or any other multiverse theory. Instead, we are asking about our very own universe and the possibility that your doppelgänger is out there – same nose, same eyes, even the same thoughts. It is an idea that goes back to physicist Max Tegmark at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It might seem absurd. But ultimately it comes down to the probability that there is another bit of space, the same size as the one you occupy, in exactly the same quantum state, encoding the likely arrangements of all the particles that make up you. [“5 mind-bending numbers that could reveal the secrets of the universe,” Antonio Padilla, NewScientist (13 August 2022, paywall)]

For the record, Padilla’s number looks like this: 10¹⁰⁶⁸

And HTML renders it properly, too. I had my doubts.

I think the Republicans just won’t get it – collectively speaking – until it’s way too late:

The suggestion Thursday by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that his party could fall short of taking control of the chamber this fall — in part because of “candidate quality” — is not sitting well with some conservatives in his party.

Stephen Miller, a former senior aide to former president Donald Trump, said McConnell is the one to blame for prospects of a Republican takeover of the Senate that are “shrinking every single day.”

“We are witnessing in real time the greatest self-inflicted wound we have ever seen,” Miller said during an appearance on Fox News.

Miller asserted that McConnell has been focused on picking candidates that he thinks will help him stay in leadership and faulted him for not trying to create a national referendum on immigration and other issues. [WaPo]

McConnell, for all of his own flaws, comes from an earlier generation of Repubilcans, and at least is seeing the relationship between general characteristics of candidates and the expectations of the electorate, and speaking of it.

Those who are complaining about him? They’re the youngsters who were brought up sucking on former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s (R-GA) philosophy that winning elections is the end-all, be-all goal.

In other words, their metric is winning elections.

And that’s what they’ve been doing with the philosophy we’ve seen developed and implemented from the days of that quitter, Gingrich. Briefly, it consists of extremism, dismissal of expertise and experience and competency, single issue voting, and, paramount, the pursuit of power at the expense of everything else.

This synergy has worked in many geographical areas. The single issue voting over such issues as gun rights, abortion, taxation, and regulation provided the pivot around which extremism and incompetency could achieve office. Once in office, well, that was the goal, now wasn’t it?

Actual governing, which is the proper metric, was ignored. Anyone who observed the Trump Administration, and the GOP in the two Congresses of the same time period, knows this to be true. You don’t need to take my word for it, the reality is unavoidable. For even more examples, visit the GOP during the Bush II and Obama Administrations. It was party time, as they say.

But what of those complaining about McConnell? They are the conservatives brought up under the Gingrich political dictums, and, for most, it’s all they know. And they saw success using those rules, that philosophy, didn’t they?

And so they’ve been blinded by the wrong metric, that of winning elections, because the activities behind winning elections has resulted in both a changed electorate and candidates with different characteristics.

The electorate has seen Roe overturned by Dobbs, and the stories of the struggles of women forced to carry dead or terminally flawed fetuses to term, of raped little girls having to travel across State lines to get an abortion, all to satisfy the pretentious egos of politicos who think they know the mind of a divinity with which there has never been a verified communications. They’ve seen gun violence that had been falling begin to climb again, their children gunned down on the streets, ghost guns coming into use, and self-righteous and indignant gun owners proclaiming everyone should have one.

And the candidates are those who’ve successfully used the RINOing tactic to be rid of Republican moderates, where those moderates are yesterday’s radicals, now no longer in comparison to the religious zealots who can’t believe the Constitution has an Establishment clause, such as Rep Boebert (R-CO) and gubernatorial candidate Mastriano (R-PA). Their ranks have been growing for years: Gosar, Greene, Gohmert, and many more, all are familiar to those who pay attention to their absurd antics and recognize them for power-mad fools. I still like Greene’s Jewish Space Lasers.

The chemistry between candidates and audience has changed.

But these folks aren’t going to figure it out. No one likes to second-guess their own success. So McConnell will continue to take the flak for the mistakes of Miller, Senator Rick Scott (R-FL), and many others who have clung to Gingrich’s precepts or Trump’s knees or their own overweening egos.

And, I suspect, they will go down screaming in November, screaming about cheating and McConnell and anything else but their own broken ideologies. They’ll be broken politicos, lost in their life vests as the American electorate takes a turn they didn’t expect and don’t understand.

While reading this WaPo article on imminent restrictions to the uses of the Colorado River, one of the most significant rivers of the American West, it occurred to me that I don’t really have a feel for its course or the cities it serves, unlike the Mississippi. The latter, I know without looking it up, starts a little north of the Twin Cities at Lake Itasca in Minnesota, goes through the Twin Cities, divides Minnesota from Wisconsin, Wisconsin from Iowa, Iowa from Illinois, serves Pepin, WI, which I only mention for its delicious restaurant, Harbor View Cafe, serves St. Louis and eventually ends up entering the Gulf of Mexico at NOLA (New Orleans, Louisiana).

So let’s see a map!

The Colorado River
Source: American Rivers

Sourcing out of the Rocky Mountains, the Colorado River flows through Grand Junction, CO, Moab, UT, the artificial Lake Powell on the Utah / Arizona border, all the while picking up contributions from tributaries. Crossing Arizona, it passes into Lake Mead, another artificial reservoir formed by the operation of the famed Hoover Dam and that I’ve alarmed over before, and near Las Vegas, NV. Heading south, it passes by some smaller cities and forms the border between Arizona and California, before passing into Mexico and, at one time, eventually feeding into the Gulf of California, that gulf on the west side of Mexico formed by Baja California and the Mexican mainland, as it were. Now I read it no longer makes it there.

But going over this by river only isn’t a wise course. In the map above, the olive and turquoise areas serve to illuminate the Colorado River basin, and it’s that area to which the Colorado River provides water. This includes most of Arizona, including Phoenix, Scottsdale, and Flagstaff. The Water Education Foundation states the Colorado River provides water to 40 million people and more than 5 million acres of farmland in a region encompassing some 246,000 square miles. American Rivers suggests the number is 36 million.

Not quite sure what that means? The recent US Census effort suggests the United States has a population of roughly 330 million people. That means, roughly, that 10%-12% of the US population has some sort of direct dependency on the Colorado River.

In other words, the water source for 12% of the United States population is at risk of becoming inadequate.

So what’s going on?

First, population has been growing. Macrotrends has the last four years’ population estimates for the Las Vegas metro area growing at about 2.7% annually. That’s not small over twenty years. Phoenix is growing at a similar rate, according to World Population Review.

Second, everyone wants water without paying for it. Face it, this is an American tradition. Speaking as a four-time visitor to India, it’s not a world-wide tradition. There you ask for bottled water and you may be charged for it. But here we tend to use water with little thought; we even talk about spending money like water to describe the profligate.

Third, as this WaPo article notes, the Colorado River is being starved of water due to a drought:

The root of the problem is an ongoing 23-year drought, the worst stretch for the region in more than a millennium. Mountain snowpack that feeds the 1,450-mile river has been steadily diminishing as the climate warms. Ever-drier soils absorb runoff before it can reach reservoirs, and more frequent extreme heat hastens evaporation.

“The prolonged drought afflicting the West is one of the most significant challenges facing our communities and our country,” Beaudreau said. “The growing drought crisis is driven by the effects of climate change, including extreme heat and low precipitation.”

Climate change that we had a chance to ameliorate and foolishly threw away that chance over the last, at least, decade. California is beginning to bend a bit, at least:

Grass is the single largest irrigated “crop” in America, surpassing corn and wheat, a frequently-cited study from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found. It noted by the early 2000s, turfgrass, mostly in front lawns, spanned about 63,000 square miles, an area larger than the state of Georgia.

Keeping front lawn grass alive requires up to 75% of just one household’s water consumption, according to the study, which is a luxury California is quickly becoming unable to afford as the climate change-driven drought pushes reservoirs to historic lows. [CNN]

Lake Powell is nearly not a lake any longer.

The remarks of the fishing guides interviewed by the journalist are more than a little unsettling. I hope there’s a special explanation for the huge implied drop in water levels at Lake Powell.

Of course, if you look hard enough it’s possible to find some lemonade. In Europe, if they can gather the gumption and money, they have an unexpected chance to clear part of the Danube River in Serbia of dangerous World War II debris:

This week, low water levels on the Serbian section of the Danube River exposed a graveyard of sunken German warships filled with explosives and ammunition. The vessels, which emerged near the port town of Prahovo, were part of a Nazi Black Sea fleet that sank in 1944 while fleeing Soviet forces. More ships are expected to be found lodged in the river’s sandbanks, loaded with unexploded ordnance. [WaPo]

But that’s a real weak lemonade. The point here is to ask whether we are willing to do what’s necessary to continue to live in those areas of the country, such as no more green grass lawns and irrigating farms, or if it’s just time to move out.

The Middle East continues to warm to cryptocurrencies:

Iran has reportedly registered its first import order purchased via cryptocurrency.

The Iranian news outlet Tasnim reported today that the crypto amount is worth $10 million.

The outlet left out numerous details on the order, including what the order is for and from whom, plus which cryptocurrency was used.

Cryptocurrencies will be used widely in Iran for foreign trade, according to Tasnim, which is linked to Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. [AL-Monitor]

UAE may not be a scary entity; the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps definitely qualifies. So ripping them off may be less likely.

And cryptocurrency’s transparency has an impact on sanction evasion:

Cryptocurrencies is also still not used widely and its blockchain is publicly accessible. This makes it less plausible crypto will be utilized to evade sanctions to a significant degree, according to the Baffi Carefin research center in Italy.

Probably depends on how well an identity can be covered up.

They were hiding in rabbit holes, but now they use rhino holes.

• TargetSmart claims in a Tweet – so this that as you will – new voter registrations in States with poor abortion rights protections have surged among the young woman group. The implied raising of the importance of politics and governance in the younger portion of the electorate is not only significant for the 2022 election, but will carry forward into future elections. It may even apply to generations too young to vote in the 2022 election, but still paying attention. The SCOTUS conservatives’ “victory” symbolized by Dobbs may mark the beginning of a very long occupation of minority status by the Republican Party, regardless of its composition, in the United States. More analysis of TargetSmart’s claims by Laura Clawson on Daily Kos here.
• New Hampshire’s Senator Hassan (D), despite not having an opponent as of yet, does not do well in a Saint Anselm College poll. It’s more than a little difficult to see her losing to these far-right extremists, but I suppose anything is possible.
• A profile of Oklahoma candidate in the special election to replace the retiring Senator Inhofe (R), and former Rep, Kendra Horn (D) is here in Roll Call. Its descriptions of Oklahoma Republicans reminds me of those of Kansas Republicans, arrogantly certain of themselves even after their Constitutional Amendment was shot down. But that doesn’t mean Horn will be winning this fall.
• Colorado’s Senator Bennet (D) has an eight point lead over challenger Joe O’Dea (R), according to a poll by McLaughlin and Associates from a couple of weeks ago. That is not as good as the previous poll result of a twelve point lead for Bennet. The problem? McLaughlin and Associates gets only a “C/D” rating from FiveThirtyEight. The link to the poll notes that McLaughlin and Associates has ties to the Republican establishment, which may skew their results as they try to please their patrons. Even the linked article mentions this. I still think Bennet should win this race, but I’m not sure I’d accord this result much credibility. A WaPo report suggests O’Dea is a moderate Republican, which may make Bennet’s job a little tougher.
• Unlike the unknown pollster Center Street PAC, A- rated Emerson College Polling has J. D. Vance (R) leading Rep Tim Ryan (D) in Ohio, 45% – 42%, in its first poll of the Ohio Senate race, suggesting Ryan has a hill to climb and that the seat from Ohio remains in doubt.
• Incumbent Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) reportedly wants to invest Social Security funds in … the stock market! I don’t have access to the original article, but I just have to wonder what happens to those Social Security checks when the market crashes, and what would happen to the market if a large blob of money was invested. In fact, it all sounds like madness to me. However, don’t confuse this with the Bush 43 plan to privatize Social Security, which was explored in detail and rejected.
• Harry Enten, former FiveThirtyEight-ite now with CNN, confirms Senator McConnell’s fear that many Republican Senate candidates are disliked by the electorate using polls. Of course.

The previous book of Senatorial doom is here, right down that rabbit hole, two to the left. Right. Up.

This is certainly not rare.

But it’s nice clear pictures. I’ve put them on iNaturalist.

2.0 (2018). Environmentalist movie? Anti-environmentalist movie? Evil ornithologist, enraged by the murder of his birds, commits suicide in order to take revenge on, well, everyone via the Old Gods?

Via kaiju?

It’s weird, alright.

Oh, yeah. That has to be Elvis, right?